
Class S L 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



33p Jmrriet ©♦ JJatne* 



OLD PEOPLE. With an Introduction by Alice 
Brown. Square i2mo, $1.25, net. Postage 
extra. 

GIRLS AND WOMEN. i6mo, 75 cents. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



OLD PEOPLE 



OLD PEOPLE 



BY 

HARRIET E. PAINE 

M 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

ALICE BROWN 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1910 






COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY ALICE P. PAINE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October 1910 



SCI.A275U95 



To 
WINIFRED AND LUCRETIA 



CONTENTS 



Harriet Eliza Paine ix 

I. Greeting Old Age 1 

II. Change and Breadth 15 

III. The Passing of the Glory . . . .22 

IV. Work 34 

V. Earning a Living ...... 53 

VI. On Keeping Young 64 

VII. Outward Beauty 72 

VIII. Darkness 83 

IX. Silence . . . . . . « . .98 

X. Weakness and Dependence .... 124 

XI. The Inner Life of the Old .... 145 

XII. The Relations of the Old and Young . 150 

XIII. After Fourscore 170 

XIV. The Renewal of Emotion .... 200 
XV. A Last Lesson in Friendship .... 213 

XVI. Last Lessons in Character .... 229 

XVII. Privileges 238 

XVIII. Sunset 244 



HARRIET ELIZA PAINE 

When these chapters on old age were written 
Miss Paine was not yet sixty. But the signal flags 
of the other port were out. Age was coming on 
her prematurely. She had grown very deaf, her 
sight was dimming, and always a delicate woman, 
chiefly by reason of overwork, she was the daily 
prey of that exhaustion which slays the weak and 
fortifies the inwardly strong to more gallant em- 
prise. So at this time she was trying to pierce the 
darkness of the path while she retained the keen- 
est insight to compare it with the way behind, and 
her conclusion was that old age — actual old age 
— is the last enemy to be overcome. I am sure 
she would have called it rather than death the last 
enemy, and her working formula was that it must 
be met with courage and cheerfulness, upon which 
it becomes at last a friend. Her courage is not 
bravado, nor the masking of inadequacy under 
the trappings of a fictitious youthf ulness ; her 
cheerfulness is no sulking patience. She would not 



x MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

have us lose the dignity and worth of the mo- 
ment when, like the old men of Rome, unable 
to fight and scorning to fly, awaiting death in 
their ivory chairs, we prepare for what must be. 
Our prancings after the body no longer serves 
us become, she knows, grotesque ; but she would 
have us walk dutifully, heads up, eyes straight 
on the home-stretch, to God Who is the end 
of all. 

Her own life had been crowded by study and 
service, and, in spite of extraordinary troubles, 
illuminated with that happiness which comes from 
the constant perception of beauty, — not an ac- 
quiescent acceptance of the universe as "very 
good " because tradition tells us so, and of our 
making the best of it since we are in a bad box 
and might as well cry small, lest Setebos overhear, 
but the healthy, unfailing conviction that this is 
actually the best of all possible worlds (until it is 
possible to make it better), and that a thousand 
lifetimes could not begin to exhaust its near-at- 
hand wonders and delights. She would be the 
last person surprised when radium was plucked 
out of the unknown, or when, to the refined vi- 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xi 

sion, new spiritual laws reveal themselves. She 
knew the riches of the treasury. 

The brief catalogue of her life — that outer in- 
tegument of circumstance which, after all, tells 
no more about us than a toilworn hand bears wit- 
ness to the number of gardens it has caused to 
bloom — shows chiefly that she worked continu- 
ously and very hard. She was born in Rehoboth, 
Massachusetts, May 5, 1845, the only daughter of 
the Reverend John Chester and Eliza Folger Paine, 
and was a graduate of Wheaton Seminary, where 
the thoroughness and brilliancy of her scholarship 
are traditional. Wheaton, in its inception, had a 
simplicity of oldtime ideals. Miss Paine herself in 
her Life of Mrs. Wheaton, daughter-in-law of the 
Founder, comes on this draft, never actually used, 
but still illuminative, for the incorporation of the 
Seminary. It is in Judge Wheaton's own hand, 
and this was the object of the school : " The pro- 
motion of piety, religion, and morality ; and the 
education of females in all branches of Science 
and Literature that are suitable and proper for 
them to attend to.' 9 This was the rather stiff tap- 
root of a school which became a wonder in its 



xii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

growth and blossoming. Miss Lareom taught lit- 
erature there and infused into the girls more high 
and warm emotions even than the love of learn- 
ing. She herself, in a reminiscent talk about the 
life there, as she knew it, gave this offhand, charm- 
ing picture : " The beauty of the life at Norton 
was the blending of wilderness and garden. The 
gardens looked out into meadows and woods, and 
meadow and wood crept up to meet the gardens. 
Pine forests and old apple orchards ran wild to- 
gether. Meadowlarks and woodthrushes came up 
and sang at the Seminary windows at sunrise, 
waking us before the i rising bell.' Always there 
was a sort of wild flower flavor about the girls 
themselves. . . . We were down in the wet mead- 
ows after violets and anemones and arethusas, in 
our rubber boots, or reciting botany in the arbor 
across the way in Mrs. Wheaton's garden, using 
ferns and rose leaves for book-marks in a logic or 
rhetoric or mental philosophy. Everything was 
breezy, fresh, unschooled, even in school. This 
combination of nature and cultivation made the 
charm of the school, and we learned there the 
lesson of life, that we are truly educated through 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR^ xiii 

all our existence by growing together, and by 
entering into the spirit of the growth around us. 
The garden need never be afraid of the wilder- 
ness, and the wilderness may always be at home 
in the garden." 

It was perfectly evident to all of us who, in our 
turn, came under the teaching and influence of 
Norton graduates, that the Wheaton regime must 
have been a tough one. Some of us look back and 
see clearly that " our teachers " were not as other 
women, and this is not because we regarded them 
then from the distance of the leaflet at the foot 
of the pine. They actually were different, and the 
tests of our own grown-up years confirm it. They 
were richly developed, magnificently drilled. They 
had been held up to an exacting standard of schol- 
arship, and at the same time to reverence and obey 
the rules of life. But above all, they had a peculiar 
quality. They had been trained to look for beauty 
as an actual efflorescence in the universe — an im- 
manence, rather — and to regard it as unspeak- 
ably necessary and holy, the sacramental touch 
and also the bread of life. When the school at 
Norton was given a half holiday one morning 



xiv MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

after a snowfall and sent for a sleighride, because 
it was judged that they " must see the woods in 
their supreme beauty before one touch of sun- 
shine had dissolved their charm/' we know what 
those women at the head of it thought essential. 
They were not teaching their girls to shine in 
graces and acquirement. They were leading them 
to look through the magic lens of opportunity, to 
see how " the heavens declare the glory of God 
and the firmament showeth His handiwork." 

After Miss Paine's graduation she taught for a 
time in Cleveland, in an institution for the feeble- 
minded, and then returned to Wheaton, to teach 
the natural sciences and higher mathematics. Now 
she was set upon by the results of her passionate 
energy, and, hit hard by overwork, went abroad ; 
yet there, unable to rest, beguiled by the fullness 
of life, she studied French and German and heard 
all the music possible, and after she came back 
the course of her middle years was an unbroken 
one of teaching, at the Robinson Female Seminary 
in Exeter, the Oread Institute in Worcester, and 
the private schools of Boston. Wheaton had always 
done splendid work in the natural sciences, teach- 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xv 

ing by observation, by experiment, and " when in 
the early sixties the first wave of interest in the 
natural sciences swept over the land " the school 
rose again to that bigger challenge. It established 
laboratory work, and its teachers were in the van. 
This was Miss Paine's excellent training, and ac- 
cording to this standard she in her turn taught. 
During her later work in the natural sciences she 
kept on with arduous private study and, one of 
her compeers writes of her, " soon stood abreast of 
the specialists." But her territory was not bounded 
by a specialty. She taught literature warmly, sym- 
pathetically, history and languages. Her equip- 
ment was very rich. She had holdings in all the 
kingdoms of the earth. 

In 1902 she gave up teaching and returned to 
her home in Groveland, Massachusetts, and there 
lived out the rest of her beautiful days. She had 
taught all the most active years of her life, the 
rich, fecund part of it, and yet she never loved 
teaching. She owned that to some of her more 
trusted pupils. She was devoted to them and their 
growth, but she was wearied by the rigor of rou- 
tine, averse to any kinship with the dull task- 



xvi MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

master known as discipline, and generalship was 
hateful to her. For she was the shyest spirit, and 
her desires were elsewhere. Back in her happy 
childhood, when a song Festival of the Rose, a 
child's cantata in the woods, made her innocent 
paradise, the minister's good little daughter was 
in love with the idea of writing books. And she 
did write in the cracks of time between heavy du- 
ties, with the slight strength left over from her 
tasks. There was no overplus of vitality to pour 
into some big achievement. One novel there was, 
published anonymously in her girlhood and never 
owned to later acquaintances, so that to this day 
some of us thirst for the secret of it. We believe 
there are still those who know, but because the 
name was refused us, we turn away. But we think 
we can guess what manner of book it was. Maybe 
it was about music — for music was her adoration 
— something of Charles Auchester perhaps, a 
girl's shy romance, a guess at life as youth would 
have it, a dutiful child's conception of duty. But 
all this we who were "her girls" evolved about 
her, for she was too uncompromisingly cold to her 
own achievements to think there was anything in 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xvii 

them to tell. Quite unconsciously she walked in 
the robes of admiration we clothed her withal; 
she seemed to us to be made of every creature's 
highest and most intellectual best. 

There is no doubt that, to the schoolgirl, Miss 
Paine's first aspect was that of the moralist. We 
were afraid of her. Le fou rive died at her light 
step toward the classroom, and, little prigs ! no 
doubt we snatched and proffered many an aspira- 
tion newborn in her presence to challenge her 
goodwill. But that instinctive fear of the inflexi- 
ble spirit in her wore away. She was beautifully 
kind. Her sense of humor balanced her sense of 
responsibility, and some of us remember with joy 
a dress rehearsal of an ill-fitting and too-ambi- 
tious play when extreme costumes had been sent 
us, and with our spindle shanks and plumed hats 
we were more cockatoo than courtier (even the 
egg of Chantecler had not then been laid), and 
our moralist, our mentor, our preceptress fell into 
hysterics of her own and showed how human she 
could be. After that we began to guess that, when 
things were funny, she had delighted ecstasies 
even as our own. For serious things were too uni- 



xviii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

formly expected of her, chiefly because she looked 
the part of weight and wisdom. Nature had set- 
tled it that she should move perpetually in the 
mask of an age greater than her own. She had 
an old-fashioned face, the face of miniatures and 
frontispieces to wise books, the womanly sugges- 
tion of the Dante-George Eliot-Savonarola mask, 
so strongly, almost coarsely sketched in them, so 
feminized in her. And her gray-blue eyes, direct 
always, and stern upon occasion, had a peculiar 
spark in them, the ray, the light that shone from 
Charlotte Bronte's face. She was a very little wo- 
man, round-wristed, small of hand. She could not 
do athletic things, but what she essayed to bring 
her into closer touch with the outdoor life of a 
growing world, she did perfectly. Summer days 
in Exeter saw her rowing on the lovely river, 
feathering her oar with a finished grace. She knew 
the haunts of the shyest flowers. How many of 
us owe to her the first bright moment of discov- 
ery ! She walked by instinct to the dwelling place 
of fern and orchid ; the warm day is yet living 
when she took us on pilgrimage to "spring beauty," 
and the hazy autumn afternoon, lovely child of a 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xix 

frosty morning, when she showed us the meadow 
dark-stained with gentian. There were still cold 
nights when she pointed out the stars. Her inter- 
ests were as multitudinous as the stars themselves; 
it seems not possible to find any corner where 
light and life were reigning where she did not 
turn the lens of eagerness. It was not the avid 
greediness of the accumulator vaunting himself 
of the " intellectual life," but the intense curiosity 
born of wonder of the soul who passionately de- 
sires to understand God's world. She was fain of 
the universe itself, its "supreme energies." She 
knew and dwelt in "the glory and the dream." 

In those days of her young womanhood she was 
deep in books, — Herbert Spencer, the latest and 
most abstruse science, comparative religion, the 
ancient epics, great novels — nothing unworthy 
ever, nothing trivial and vain, but with nice crusty 
bites round the edges of fantasy, fairy tales, the 
Hunting of the Snark. Nobody was ever less self- 
conscious in preference for the highest and finest, 
nobody so far removed from prigdom. 

She was always hoping for a little, a very little 
more strength, that she might write at last. In 



xx MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

1882, she had published a thin green book, Bird 
Songs of New England, poetical precursor of the 
" how-to-know" manuals for learning to observe. 
The unpretending prefatory note says that the 
" verses make no claim as poetry." She was trying 
to " enable readers to identify some of the birds 
for themselves." Yet the verse has a sweet intent, 
a gentle pace. She likes to talk about the birds, 
to talk to them. To the wood pewee she says : — 

"In the winter thou dost cheer us, 
But, when happier birds are near us, 
Thou dost sadly sing apart." 

And this is the black-throated green warbler : — 

"The greenwood is a cathedral, 

And through its arches dim 
A little bird sings at noontide 

A song which is like a hymn. 
It rises through the summer air 
Like the voice of a holy nun in prayer : 
6 Hear me, Saint Theresa ! ' " 

Afterwards, under the pseudonym of " Eliza 
Chester/' came Girls and Women, Chats with 
Girls on Self- Culture and The Unmarried 
Woman. These were all, in their way, a part of 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxi 

her teaching. She was absolutely concerned with 
the desire to turn in her power toward the good o£ 
the whole, and for those chiefly who were un- 
formed and struggling. If she had not herself 
worked so hard and found the enterprise so great, 
if life had allowed her the luxury of being merely 
a learned woman, nobody can say what high in- 
tellectual scope her work might have taken. Here 
again was George Eliot's Dorothea sinking the 
glowing dream in small realities : " The effect of 
her being on those around her was incalculably 
diffusive : for the growing good of the world is 
partly dependent on unhistoric acts ; and that 
things are not so ill with you and me as they might 
have been is half owing to the number who lived 
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited 
tombs." 

Now, so desirous was she of " making the blind 
to see" the beauties of right conduct and the 
lovely world, that she wrote familiarly, in a con- 
versational way, for those who might not be drink- 
ing out of the big, splendid chalice of insight and 
knowledge, but must ever thirst without little cups 
suited to their grasp. For sometime in her life, it is 



xxii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

impossible to say how, the great change and flow- 
ering had come out of it. She had perhaps heard 
God out of the Burning Bush of some sacrificial 
revelation, or she had climbed that slow and ardu- 
ous steep, through dull obedience, through faith 
to sudden illumination from the very light of His 
near countenance. She had begun to " see God." 
And having learned that One sitteth behind the 
clouds, unchanging save in different radiant aspects 
of His love, she did not lose the comfort of it. 
She had found that her " Vindicator," the Vindi- 
cator of every atom, lives, and at the end justice 
shall reign with love. Those who knew her most 
familiarly may be able to say that her ideals were 
always the same, but perhaps some of us may 
guess without presumption that at first she upheld 
the truth, the rectitude, the stern duty paramount 
in George Eliot whom she loved. Her worship of 
the truth was a very clean, whole-souled passion. 
She did no dickering with it, splitting hairs with 
the fastidiousness that drives the lax to frenzy, 
but she told it splendidly. She says she was shy; 
but for conscience' sake she would have been 
ready to die at the sword's point — or whatever 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxiii 

rougher torture the modern world has substituted 
for clean thrusts. And then sometime, somehow, 
she learned transcendently and breathed only in 
the knowledge that the one name is Love, — that 
there is, in fact, in a universe " bound by gold 
chains about the feet of God " nothing but love, 
which is our small word for the integrity of the 
whole. More and more she extended her fibres 
among her kind. We know well enough the sort 
of life she would have chosen — days on the river, 
pilgrimage to the haunts of leaf and bird ; this in 
the greenwood days until even the wood things are 
some of them housed, and then hours of study by 
the fire, books and thought. This was the minimum 
of what a woman of her attainment might have 
been expected to crave as suitable daily food, — 
and beyond that the higher heaven of travel, music 
and the sister arts. But when she settled down at 
Groveland to " take in sail," it was no well-earned 
repose. She did the humblest daily tasks with a 
painstaking care the more marvelous because they 
were not her kind of task, and she had to put into 
them an amount of energy she never needed at the 
microscope or the printed page. She concerned 



xxiv MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

herself with Village Improvement and the Histori- 
cal Society. She was a public-spirited citizen and 
a good neighbor, and there is no doubt that she 
looked with almost pathetic awe and admiration on 
women who could turn out frosting and embroidery 
— not that these arts were so desirable in them- 
selves, but because the easy secret of them was 
hidden from her. Nature had made her in a certain 
way, and for certain tasks. God, the One of Secret 
Knowledge, working through her imperious sense 
of duty, denied her always the full exercise of her 
natural gifts. It was as if she had been called upon 
to learn the way of perfect obedience as she con- 
ceived it ; to pour every drop of blood she had into 
human service. " The things of a man for which 
we visit him," says Emerson, " were done in the 
dark and cold." Those were still, dark years at 
Groveland, as cold as a winter frost. But now the 
singing of birds has come. The mortal part of her 
has died, and we cannot help feeling there is one 
star the more, and that all such stars in whose 
immortal, young company she finds herself have 
time to sing together. 

As the years went on, her rich hair faded, her 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxv 

face fell into the inevitable lines, — noble ones, all 
of them, — but beauty, ineffable because it breathed 
from faculties sweetly harmonized, made her aura 
and her crown. Age — what she called age, though 
she died at sixty-four — seemed to be her blos- 
soming time. For all her homespun duties, the life 
of high achievement never flagged. After she had 
retired from teaching, she gave some private lec- 
tures in Boston and New York, on the Greek 
Tragedies, the Siegfried Idyll, the Parzival of 
Wolfram von Eschenbach, and to see her come into 
the lecture room was to feel that you were looking 
at a portrait, a lady of the olden time : for hardly 
any such delicate survival exists in the grotesque 
rejuvenescence of to-day. Her soft black silk dress 
was made according to a vogue irrevocably past, 
probably not that she especially wished it so, but 
that it hardly occurred to her that fashions were 
gone by; her white lace fichu was held by the 
little Psyche pin so many classrooms knew as her 
only ornament. She was the picture of a rare sim- 
plicity. 

The simplicity was a part of her. After the pub- 
lication of one of her books, Mr. Henry A. Clapp, 



xxvi MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

then dramatic critic of the Boston Advertiser, 
called on her to carry the tribute of his admiration. 
He said afterwards, evidently having suggested 
that the book might he the stepping-stone to some- 
thing more ambitious, — "But she wants nothing 
— literally nothing." She had learned to want 
nothing — but to fulfill the will of God. 

These colloquial little books of hers are no index 
of what she could have done if she had made her 
sacrifice to art and not to life. Her letters are full 
of spontaneous beauties, small phrases exquisitely 
expressed, like this, written in a long-past winter, — 

" There is a rushing wind to-night, and the uni- 
verse is one great crystal, my little warm room its 
only flaw." 

Natural sights and, until she became deaf, 
sounds, form the charming calendar she shares 
with kindred minds. 

"Do you not think," she writes, "flowers are 
a guarantee of the ever-brooding love in a special 
way?" 

In October, 1909, when she was far from well, 
and weighed down by calamity if it had not been 
for her radiant certainties, she writes: — 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxvii 

" How wonderful the clear cool skies are ! When 
we were young at Norton how we used to enjoy 
the long walks on such days as these! But now, 
though I hardly go out of my yard, the cup of 
beauty seems to be always overflowing, so that I 
do not need to go away to find it." 

Here was a woman old in that she had lost her 
physical strength, her hearing, three quarters of 
her sight, and she was illogically filled with a rap- 
turous content. She who had been caught up by 
music to the upper heaven could not hear it. She 
who had studied art in form and color all her life 
dwelt in a quiet country village, doing common 
tasks so consecrated by her intention that the 
mind marvels to think of them — and all the time 
she seemed to be inspired by a fervor of obedience. 
In 1909 she wrote: — 

" I thought I appreciated Tintern Abbey when 
I was a girl, but I had not lived it then ; but now 
I have been literally led i from joy to joy ' for 
more than sixty years, and I know what it means." 

In 1908 she wrote that she had " been review- 
ing all the fine poetry I ever learned, to be pre- 
pared against days of greater dimness. It has 



xxviii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

always been hard for me to learn by heart, and 
I hardly have courage for new conquests now, but 
I find reviewing easy. I have reviewed twenty 
chapters of the Bible, most of them learned at 
Norton, and I can't tell you how grateful I am 
for that early drill." 

The most religious of women, she had perhaps 
no formulated faith. The whole thing was too big. 
To pack it into a creed would have been to snap 
the mould. In her youth her mind had stirred 
vigorously toward liberal thought, a grievous state 
of things when all her home affiliations were or- 
thodox and every breaking of a common bond 
must have brought tears and blood. But the beauty 
of her later life was that, whatever her habit of 
thought, in the expression of it she seemed to 
have come home to rest. The mother-speech of 
formulated religion now sprang naturally to her 
lips. In the printed pages that follow, what must 
have been in terms of her own mind the Unknow- 
able becomes Our Heavenly Father. Once she had 
at least believed, because her seeing eyes showed 
her the way the universe was made, its unassail- 
able integrity; but now she felt the most intimate 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxix 

personal love in what is within us and without us, 
in even the most brutal circumstance the divine 
intent. 

She had had her days when, her back against 
the everlasting verities, she was stable as a rock 
in certainty of the dutiful deed required. But this 
rock of resolution was to be covered by the leaf- 
age of a gracious leniency toward human nature 
as it is, — even toward herself. In one so strong 
of will, moreover, it was reasonable that the 
unbendingness of personal resistance should have 
bred something like pride, the child of self-reli- 
ance, the pride that is, she humbly owns, so hard 
to tell from self-respect. And it showed itself in 
a queer little way only, a pathetic, childlike way. 
She did not "like to take things." Tangible gifts 
frightened her. She would let you walk a mile 
to get her a flower from the roadside, but at the 
nosegay bought with money she looked serious. 
Nobody quite knew why this was, perhaps she 
least of all. But at last even pride was put under 
her feet, and she accepted the most lavish service, 
beautifully given, with a perfect gratitude and 
humility. 



xxx MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

Shall we dare to think from what root flowered 
the brave, fine blossoms of this book? Courage 
and cheerfulness do not come by wishing. When 
a body is in the decline of its normal powers, 
when duty exists without the strength to do it, 
when the brain is keenly as ever aware that beauty 
goes flowing on while the dim eyes blink at it — 
then the fight is on indeed. The whole body, every 
atom of it, is tending downward. It is mortal, and 
mortality — the fluent circle of it without — claims 
its own. "Let me," it beseeches at last, "return 
to the dust whence I came, for I, too, am dust, 
and there only is my kinship." But sitting aloft 
in sublimest health over the failing powers of this 
woman was the soul, insisting on every jot of the 
old obedience from nerve and muscle that cried 
for rest. Whatever blackness encompassed her 
mortal mind, from her lips came the more clearly 
the brave cry of Forward ! She had come to the 
Dark Tower, but she was like that other — 

" Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 
And blew." 

And is it not true of all those who have come to 
the Dark Tower in such a spirit that there is not 



MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR xxxi 

one who has failed to plant a banner on it to 
hearten the rest of us on our way? 

In Miss Paine' s last illness she looked like an 
emaciated saint. Francis of Assisi after his spiritual 
and bodily warfare could not have been more beau- 
tiful to the seeing eye. Day by day, instant by in- 
stant in all the sacrificial years, the soul had been 
moulding the body to a mask so full of heavenly 
life, so alien to decay that Death himself might 
have foregone his triumph and stood aside in awe 
to let the angels claim it. At last she had gone 
elsewhere leaving us the ineffable legacy of her 
belief in us. For there was one part of her tem- 
peramental life, very beautiful, almost piercing in 
its simplicity, that characterized her most, — faith 
in the friends she loved, almost a fervor of admi- 
ration for them. Toward human error she was ever 
mild of speech, but her appreciations came with a 
torrential rush. The smallest right achievement 
seemed marvelous in her eyes, and by some alembic 
those she loved were even in their outer lendings 
not only beloved but beautiful. She had the great 
gift of admirations, and the souls she had once 
seen walked evermore sacred to her, under a chrism 



xxxii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 

of loyalty. Sbe was ever chanting their deserts. 
She put their faults swiftly aside like a base image 
she feared to look upon. Another woman, a poet, 
has seen how this might be : — 

" If I angered any among them, from thenceforth my own 

life was sore. 
If I fell by chance from their presence, I clung to their 

memory more." 

She forgave divinely. 

And at the end, when those nearest to her said 

she was dead, it was to add the words, " Who will 

believe in us now ? " 

Alice Brown. 



OLD PEOPLE 



OLD PEOPLE 



GREETING OLD AGE 

" It will be like a summer night to grow old," says 
Clara, in Charles Auchester. But Clara was almost 
a child. And Miss Sheppard herself was not much 
past twenty when she wrote the book. If she had 
discovered a truth, it was by insight and not by 
experience. Is it the truth ? Some of us have a 
stout conviction which has weathered many a gale 
that the ideal is the only reality ; but veterans un- 
derstand that to pull a steady oar always, whether 
the tide and wind and current are with us, or 
whether the tide and wind and current are against 
us, is the only way to make the reality ideal. 

A friend says that one of the most charming 
delegates to the biennial convention of women's 
clubs in California in 1902 was a lady past ninety 
years of age. She says that no one took a keener or 
more intelligent interest in all the subjects under 



2 OLD PEOPLE 

discussion, or contributed more to the social en- 
joyment of the gathering. " And her dress was 
delightful/' adds my friend. "It was jaunty, — 
really jaunty, — and yet no one thought of criti- 
cising it as too youthful. It suited her face and 
manner perfectly." 

Clearly this dear old lady was not old in the 
ordinary sense : though we are in the habit of 
thinking that ninety is a line beyond which youth 
cannot pass. If we knew her whole story, we should 
probably find that she spent many hours of weak- 
ness and weariness in solitude, though she still had 
the vigor and the spirit to give unstinted measure 
of life and blessing to other people. She may have 
been born brave and cheerful, and she may have 
inherited a sound body and a sound mind ; but she 
could never have preserved her courage and her 
winsomeness to ninety years unless she had fought 
well an active fight against selfishness and weak- 
ness. She must have borne much nobly in loneli- 
ness in order to have the strength necessary to ra- 
diate sunshine among her fellow beings. Nobody 
is made of iron, and ninety years will test the 
stoutest constitution as well as the stoutest heart. 



GREETING OLD AGE 3 

It is glorious to know that such a woman as this 
has lived. It is inspiring to think of Doctor Ed- 
ward Everett Hale, at eighty years of age, stand- 
ing on the steps of the Massachusetts State House 
at midnight in December and stretching out his 
arms in benediction over the multitude that had 
assembled to watch the old century out and the 
new century in. We feel that we too have springs 
of perennial youth within us in the power to be 
cheerful and courageous. And yet most of us face 
the fact that such men and women are exceptional, 
and that we cannot ourselves hope to rival their 
feats. Most of us have to begin our battle with 
old age before we are fifty, and yield inch after 
inch of ground with every succeeding year. 

Must it be a battle? How shall we meet old 
age? Is it possible to give old age a greeting? 
Can we say, with Browning, — 

u Grow old along with me ! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made " ? 

Shall we not grow old more gracefully if we 
yield to the inevitable than if we fight against 
it? What is the golden mean between rebellion 



4 OLD PEOPLE 

and pusillanimity? Can there be such a thing as 
courageous submission ? 

Old age always comes to us before we expect it. 
The Autocrat says his friend the Professor declared 
that he "did n't mind " his students calling; him "the 
old man," but that it was quite another matter to 
overhear a young stranger talking of him as a " very 
nice old gentleman." Now, of course it is a shock 
to find that other people count us old before we 
have ourselves discovered our age; and yet who 
would go to meet old age halfway ? What coun- 
sellor would advise us to anticipate the meeting? 
Nevertheless, we must not shrink from it. We must 
even believe that it is good ; if we trust in the 
Divine Providence, we must believe it is best. Let 
us not use the figure of a battle, then. We are not 
to fight with old age as a foe, and a foe fore- 
ordained to victory, but we are to walk down 
the declivity of life with old age as a companion. 
Youth and maturity showed us splendid sights as 
we climbed the hill, and old age will show us dif- 
ferent, but inexpressibly beautiful visions as we 
walk down the descent. We are not to resist and 
be dragged down the hill, our eyes blinded with 



GREETING OLD AGE 5 

fighting. Nor are we to fall weakly into the arms 
of our conductor and be carried down without an 
effort to look at the beauty about us. We are to 
walk; and to walk erect and steadfastly, and not 
to slip will take all the courage and strength of 
soul that we might foolishly waste in an unavail- 
ing struggle with our unconquerable companion. 
We were not to hurry breathlessly to the top of the 
hill where he was awaiting us, for then we should 
have missed glorious prospects as the horizon grew 
wider and wider. But when we have met him, even 
though we must turn reluctantly from what seems 
the supreme vision of the summit, even though we 
had hoped to gain higher peaks, — as we all do, for 
the view from^the summit we actually reach is often 
circumscribed by frowning rocks and forests, — 
then we are to walk courageously at his side, trust- 
ing in his beneficence, keeping pace with him, and 
rejoicing in the new beauty which every turn in 
the pathway unfolds before us. The pathway is a 
difficult one, thorny and stony. There are those 
who say that the descent of a mountain is harder 
than the climbing of it. The courage and cheer- 
fulness that seemed our birthright on the other 



6 OLD PEOPLE 

side must now be won by active effort when we 
feel too weak to be active. But i£ we have the 
courage to hold our heads erect, we shall see vistas 
opening into that country whose glory eye hath 
not seen. We climb the mountain on the land- 
ward side ; but the descent is toward the infinite 
sea. Who would miss the sparkle of the distant 
waves as each step brings us nearer ? Who would 
turn his head away discontentedly and try to find 
some byway leading back to the other side of the 
mountain? But the new visions are only for the 
courageous. When the moment comes to any of 
us that we first realize we are old, then, as never 
before, we must take as our watchwords " Cour- 
age " and " Cheerfulness." Most of us struggle 
hopelessly for a while, exhausting ourselves in vain, 
and forget that real courage demands that we 
conquer ourselves, and not that we conquer old 
age, who is simply our conductor to a larger life 
than that we know. 

The downward path is not only rough with 
briers, but sometimes it is enveloped in heavy 
mists which shut out the sustaining visions. Some 
of us cannot see the shining sea before us with the 



GREETING OLD AGE 7 

white-winged bark ready to carry us to lands of 
undreamed-of beauty. We feel the briers and we 
stumble over the stones, and we do not know 
whither the path is leading. We may not be to 
blame for the clouded vision. No one can choose 
exactly the form of his discipline in life. But this 
is true : if we bravely walk erect, we shall, from 
time to time, get glimpses of the wonderful unseen 
world, and the certainty of the glory will help us to 
pass through the darkest parts of the way ; while, 
if we mournfully look only at the ground, we shall 
miss this strengthening and refreshment. And 
further, — we do not walk alone: even if the 
cloud never lifts, even if, for ourselves, it seems 
easier to bear despondency than to make the effort 
to be brave, yet we must remember what a cheer- 
ful voice may mean to our fellows who are strug- 
gling through the mist beside us. We must, we 
will, take courage and be cheerful for the sake of 
others as well as for ourselves. 

So much we feel in our hours of insight ; but 
then, alas, we meet our practical difficulties, and 
each one of them seems insurmountable. We were 
sublime, and we descend straightway to the ridicu- 



8 OLD PEOPLE 

lous. In the blue-and-white penny pass-book that 
Sentimental Tommy put surreptitiously into the 
hands of Ivie McLean, dear Miss Ailie writes that 
she had sent a letter to the editor of the Mentor, 
asking up to what age he thought a needy gen- 
tlewoman had a right to teach. " The answer was 
not given, but her comment on it told everything. 
'I asked him to be severely truthful, so that I 
cannot resent his reply. But if I take his advice, 
how am I to live ? And if I do not take it, I fear 
I am but a stumbling-block in the way of true 
education.' " For Miss Ailie had to own that she 
could not stretch her fingers as she used on the 
piano, and that her French was slipping from her, 
and that decimals, always mysterious to her, grew 
more unfathomable every day. Tommy and Gavinia 
listened, and Tommy said, " I hear no laughing." 
To be sure, Miss Ailie was delivered from her 
perplexities by the delightful Ivie McLean, — " I, 
Ivie, take thee, Ailie," — though the ordeal of the 
courtship for the sensitive and conscientious maiden 
must have been scarcely less severe than the me- 
diaeval test of burning ploughshares. She who was 
too truthful to accept the beloved lover until she 



GREETING OLD AGE 9 

had confessed first, that she was fifty-one, instead 
of forty-nine, as she had led him to believe ; sec- 
ond, that not liking to admit that she was growing 
deaf, she had sometimes answered him at random 
when she had not heard what he said ; third, that 
she had discovered from a story-book that she had 
formed old-maidish habits, and these she could 
not conquer. Last of all came a silent confession ; 
she left the room, and came back looking years 
older, having removed most of her hair. " Though 
it was my own hair," she says, " but it came out 
when Kitty died." 

The mode whereby Miss Ailie was delivered from 
her difficulties is not the usual mode of deliverance 
for maiden ladies of fifty-one; but the question 
Miss Ailie asks, "How am I to live ?" is the prac- 
tical difficulty that confronts three fourths of the 
human race at the approach of age. In one of his 
voyages, Darwin describes some race, the Patago- 
nians, I think, who promptly put their old women 
to death when they were past hard work, and he tells 
us that the women tried their best to make the tribe 
believe they could work long after their strength 
failed, and that then they fled to the mountains 



10 OLD PEOPLE 

in the hope of escape. But the men were inexor- 
able. Though, in civilized countries, a decisive 
stroke does not cut the Gordian knot, life itself 
presents the same problem for solution : How are 
the physically incapable to support a physical 
existence? The world is rich enough, and even 
tender-hearted enough, to solve the problem ; but 
most of us are not like the Patagonian women 
who seem to have valued life for its own sake 
merely, and there is often poignant suffering in 
receiving charity ; indeed, it is only when pride is 
fully conquered that even the most loving charity 
can be accepted without some mixture of sharp 
pain. So, instead of making the best of age, we 
meet it as a foe, and fight against it. 

I remember a story of an old man employed in 
digging ditches, whose wrath was unbounded when 
he was offered work at a boy's wages. " A boy's 
wages, when I have worked all my life ! " And 
yet he could do only a boy's work, and his em- 
ployer, but for sympathy, would have preferred a 
strong boy to the feeble and rheumatic creature, 
over whom he must always keep a careful watch. 
If the poor fellow could only have looked at the 



GREETING OLD AGE 11 

reverse of his condition, he might have been glad 
to think he could still earn the wages of a boy. 

I know an honest old man who said, " I don't 
think I can see to build your cupboard as you want 
it built." The work was given him nevertheless ; 
but, faithful as he was, he was twice as long in 
doing it as he would once have been, and, accord- 
ingly, he asked only half-price for his time. Then 
he said quietly, " Thank you for giving me the 
chance to do this." He was walking gently down 
the slope of years. 

Stewart White tells in The Forest of a great- 
grandfather of eighty-five who still felled trees 
with an unerring stroke. He struck such a blow 
as he might have struck in his prime, and then he 
waited. He waited patiently for a long interval, 
and then he struck another blow with the same 
precision. 

These men realized Emerson's thought, — 
" It is time to be old, 
To take in sail," 
and they had learned to 

" Economize the failing river," 
and 

" Not the less revere the Giver." 



12 OLD PEOPLE 

It is, of course, a duty, as well as a delight, to 
keep young as long as we can ; but even to do that 
effectually we must know how to accept our limi- 
tations. Yet sometimes there are circumstances 
which make the struggle against them sublime. 
Mrs. Stowe, in describing a slave-market, tells us 
of a broken old woman who begs the purchaser 
of her bright-eyed young boy — the last of many 
children to be sold away from her — to buy her 
too, and she eagerly declares that, old as she looks, 
she is still able to do hard work. She cannot deny 
her rheumatism : "But, laws — dat 's nuffin'." She 
can still scrub. She stretches out her withered 
arms and tries to persuade the purchaser that they 
are all the stronger because they are no longer 
shapely. I suppose we have all seen and loved old 
people who were staggering under burdens too 
heavy to be borne, trying to sustain others whom 
they loved, and trying, when the loved ones were 
all gone, so to hold themselves up that they might 
not in their turn become a burden to those unable 
to bear it. It is not to such people that we should 
talk of limitations. When a man plunges into the 
water to save another from drowning, we do not 



GREETING OLD AGE 13 

call out to him to be careful not to take cold ; we 
look about to see what we can do to help. 

When Agamemnon entrusts to the old man the 
letter by which he hopes to save Iphigenia, he 
bids him go quickly, " plying the foot, yielding 
nought to old age." The poor old man's power is 
not equal to his zeal, and his mission fails ; but 
who does not love him the better for trying to do 
the task that was beyond him ? 

The Peleus of Euripides, when a great-grand- 
father, saves Andromache and her boy from the 
plots of their enemies. When he appears on the 
scene, " directing his aged foot in haste," the 
cruel Menelaus says contemptuously, " I bear thy 
words easily ; for thou hast a voice like as a shadow, 
being incapable of aught except only to talk." 
But the intrepid Peleus, ignoring him, calls out, 
" Lead on hither, child, standing under my arms ; 
and thou, too, wretched one " (to Andromache). 
u . . . Thou shalt not bring forward the timid 
words of women. Go on ; who will touch you ? 
He will touch you to his cost if he does. For in 
behalf of the gods, we have a command over horse 
troops, and many heavy armed soldiers in Phthia. 



14 OLD PEOPLE 

And I am still erect, and not an old man, as you 
think; but looking in the face of such a man as 
this alone, I, though an old man, will erect a trophy 
over him. For an old man, if he be valiant, is 
better than many youths. What profits it, being a 
coward, to have a good body ? " 

And Menelaus dares not oppose the hero. 

In the cause of love, of justice, we are not to 
think of limitations. " An old man, if he be val- 
iant, is better than many youths." 



II 

CHANGE AND BREADTH 

With the failing of the normal powers, there 
usually comes a change of circumstance. The mu- 
sician becomes deaf and can no longer conduct 
his orchestra. His income is cut off, and he goes 
to live with his son in a distant state. His son loves 
him, but his son's wife and children are almost 
strangers to him. His surroundings are new, and 
his habits must be changed. The mother, who has 
lived all her life in the country, a power in the 
village where she knows every person she meets, 
is no longer able to manage her own housekeeping. 
She must make her home with her daughter who 
teaches in a city, and exchange her cottage in the 
midst of trees and shrubbery for a dingy little 
apartment in an undesirable street where she knows 
no one. A Colonel Newcome loses his money when 
he is too old and feeble to earn a living, and he 
is received into the brotherhood of the Grey 
Friars. A good master dies, and the servants, who 



16 OLD PEOPLE 

are too stiff and rheumatic to be wanted in new 
places, must turn to the almshouse. An efficient, 
independent woman, who has directed the affairs of 
a neighborhood, becomes blind, and must submit 
henceforward to a companion who shall guide her 
every footstep. 

Are these changes easy to bear ? It is not easy 
even for the young to alter the whole mode of life, 
especially when the change is not a voluntary one. 
And in the case of the old, to be taken up by the 
roots and transplanted to a soil that is perhaps 
uncongenial may well have terrors. 

Have such clouds a silver lining ? I remember 
hearing a middle-aged lady say, years ago, that 
she looked upon the necessity that had forced her 
away from her beautiful country home to earn la- 
boriously a somewhat irregular livelihood in the 
city, as one of the greatest blessings that had ever 
been bestowed upon her. " For," she said, " in the 
country I was as narrow as a crack." 

" Life is growth and growth is change," Miss 
Larcom sang. We all realize that for the young 
and even for the middle-aged, — but for the old ! 
We hardly believe growth is possible for the old. 



CHANGE AND BREADTH 17 

Of course there comes a time when the powers ab- 
solutely fail j but for the courageous that day may 
be postponed. Something is possible long after 
the usual work of life has to be suspended, some- 
thing, too, that is often of a higher quality than 
the work of one's prime. The dreaded changes that 
seem so cruel in old age usually ripen the charac- 
ter instead of causing it to decay, at least when 
they befall an earnest soul. 

" To make habitually a new estimate, that is 
greatness," Emerson said. Now, in new circum- 
stances we are forced to make new estimates. We 
must sift the chaff of our lives from the wheat. 
The process is painful, but the result is worth the 
pain. 

" My daughter rules me with a rod of iron," 
said an old lady, with a cheerful laugh. The daugh- 
ter, somewhat aggrieved, explained in private that, 
with failing powers, her mother could no longer 
do as she had once done. When she raised her 
tea-cup in a trembling hand, the tea splashed over 
the tablecloth; moreover, her dim eyesight put 
an end to perfection in her dress. How could she 
really see when she was untidy? "I know she is 



18 OLD PEOPLE 

really neat," said the daughter anxiously, " for I 
remember her in the past; but the grandchildren 
can't know that, and I will not have them think 
of her as a careless old woman." So the daughter 
ruled with " a rod of iron," and the wise old lady, 
though she occasionally allowed herself the satis- 
faction of a sharp remark, yet on the whole con- 
sented with cheerfulness to the rule. She even 
allowed her daughter to introduce modern inno- 
vations into the time-honored etiquette of her life, 
and she really welcomed labor-saving inventions 
in the housekeeping. She had to do old things in 
a new way, but she adapted herself to the new 
situation so well that the very alertness of mind 
demanded of her in order to make such accom- 
modation possible lent her manner the charming 
vivacity that delighted everybody who knew her ; 
there was a sparkle about her age such as we com- 
monly associate only with youth. 

Professor William Davis of Harvard, in his 
fascinating lectures on Physiography, used to talk 
about the effect of giving new work to an old 
river. For instance, after explaining that cascades 
belong naturally to young rivers, and that as the 



CHANGE AND BREADTH 19 

stream wears down the rock to a level, they disap- 
pear, leaving the water to meander lazily over the 
plain, he would add that the whole scene might 
be changed by the upheaval of the river-bed. Then 
the old river had to begin anew to cut the rock 
down to a level, and waterfalls once more appeared 
naturally in its course. So in the case of my old 
lady's vivacity. New work had been given to her 
in her old age, and it lent her in turn the sparkle 
of youth. 

The expositors of mental healing tell us that it 
is contraction which deadens us. The sensitive and 
weak — and, we may add, the old — always have 
a tendency to contract, to withdraw into themselves 
and to cease from active effort. " My dear woman/' 
wrote a lively lady to a distant friend, " what is 
this you tell me about becoming deaf ? I thought 
only obstinate people were deaf ! " Well, who 
knows how much truth there was in that? The in- 
flexibility of mind that makes one obstinate might 
certainly so act on the nerves as to contract the 
blood-vessels supplying the ears, and starve the 
cells until they no longer respond to the stimulus 
of sound. 



20 OLD PEOPLE 

Now a change that forces us out of ruts, that 
breaks up old habits and calls on us to form new 
ones, almost always helps us to expand, unless, in- 
deed, we resist it with all our might, in which case 
we may contract to the point of induration ; and 
so, no doubt, changes of circumstance, as we grow 
old, tend not only to give us breadth of character 
but to keep us young. 

Change being so clearly a blessing, must we 
choose it? To most of us, even to those of us who 
have loved variety in early life, quiet is most at- 
tractive in old age. It seems as if we had a right 
to a resting-place between the active life and the 
new life awaiting us. Browning says : — 

" And I shall thereupon 
Take rest ere I be gone 
Again on my adventure strange and new." 

It seems as if the old had a right to live their last 
days among their familiar friends, to sit in a com- 
fortable easy-chair by their own fireside, to cease 
from struggle, and to receive the glad ministry of 
affectionate and reverent youth. It seems further- 
more as if they could do more good to old friends 
than to new ones. To some old people this interval 



CHANGE AND BREADTH 21 

of rest is granted : though it is almost always brief, 
because life is exacting and usually taxes our full 
powers, whether these are great or small. The rich 
can sometimes command such a resting-place, the 
poor very seldom. Ought we to wish for it, or should 
we vigorously seek for the change that so often 
gives us breadth ? 

Each must answer this question for himself. The 
temperament, the character, the circumstances of 
each one must decide it. I am not at all inclined to 
recommend any one to go out of his way in search 
of discipline for its own sake. If a peaceful old age 
by a beloved fireside is vouchsafed to one who is 
tired of the stir of life, it would certainly be un- 
grateful not to rejoice in it. We need have no fear 
that all the discipline we really need will not be 
offered us without our going out of the way to 
seek it. But when we see clearly that a change in 
our peaceful life is necessary, let us accept it will- 
ingly, remembering that it holds for us the possi- 
bility of a life that is broader and better. 



Ill 

THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 

When Wordsworth wrote, — 

" But yet I know, 
Where'er I go, 
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth," 

he was not an old man. No one has ever inter- 
preted the great ode as having been inspired by 
the decay of the senses. The reason, to Words- 
worth, that 

" nothing can bring back the hour 
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower/' 

is that the progress of life has dimmed the recollec- 
tion of " that imperial palace whence we came." It 
is a mental and moral change, not a physical one, 
of which he speaks. 

Yet there is a physical change that comes to most 
of us and gives poignancy to our understanding 
of Wordsworth's lines. We talk proudly in our 
youth of our independence of the senses, not so 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 23 

much as dreaming how much of our higher life is 
due to them. We are quite right, of course, in say- 
ing that they are not essential to us, and Helen 
Keller was born to prove that love and genius 
united can bridge the chasm between the clod and 
the angel absolutely without their help. But for 
most of us the failure of a single sense in even a 
slight degree casts a shadow over the universe. We 
are surprised and puzzled ; we think the cloud will 
pass. But it settles more and more heavily, like 
a pall. 

" The rainbow comes and goes, 
And lovely is the rose," 

yet now the eye has grown dim, it is too weak to 
look up at the rainbow, and it does not catch the 
flush of the opening rosebud among the leaves ; it 
is only the full-blown rose that arrests it. I have 
a friend who has become deaf. She says that the 
solid earth seemed to be slipping from under her as 
the sense of hearing gradually grew less and less 
acute. She had to readjust herself to the whole 
world, — to things as well as to persons. The fatigue 
from this readjustment acted upon her nerves and 
threatened her whole physical system. She could 



24 OLD PEOPLE 

not believe that the loss of one faculty was to 
entail the loss of others until she actually found 
it so. She had felt the transcendent delight of 
music; still, she is not what is called musical, 
and she thought that by and by she should be able 
to bear the loss of a part of the heavenly harmony 
in a full orchestra or chorus, though she found 
with gratitude that musical sounds will reach an 
ear too dull to catch the gossip of the hour. She 
fancied that she could replace music more and 
more by the beauty of the out-door world. The 
two had always seemed to appeal to the same inner 
sense. And then one day she suddenly became 
aware that a part of the charm of nature had also 
gone. She sat on the grass beside a friend, at the 
parting of woodland ways in June, tippling on 
wild strawberries, and she saw the sunset lights 
through a vista of beeches, and she felt the soft 
breeze on her cheek, as it brought her the fra- 
grance of pine boughs and sweet-fern, and she was 
happy. And then her friend raised a hand and said, 
" Hush ! there is the wood-thrush ! " and she could 
not hear it. She was no longer " lord of the senses 
five." Four senses were ministering to her at the 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 25 

moment, and she knew and loved the song of the 
thrush which she was nevermore to hear. One note 
in the chord of nature had been lost. The har- 
mony would not be so rich again. 

What is springtime in a painted world? " The 
glory and the freshness of a dream " is gone, and 
we say, with a different meaning from that of 
Wordsworth, — 

" Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
By night or day, 
The things that I have seen I now can see no more." 

It is merciful that in most cases the senses fail 
slowly, so that we adapt ourselves gradually to 
their lack. I know old people who do not seem to 
be aware that they have lost the power to see and 
hear as in youth. Of course they know that their 
grandchildren can thread a needle or hear a whis- 
per better than they can ; but they do not realize 
that the world the youngsters look at is shot 
through and through with colors they themselves 
no longer see, or that when the old and the young 
are listening to music together, the old hear only 
the fundamental tones, while the young are rav- 
ished by the rich chords formed by unnumbered 



26 OLD PEOPLE 

overtones. They do perhaps perceive that neither 
nature nor music will now sweep them away with 
such sudden delight as of old ; but they think this 
is due to the slower pulse of age, when in fact they 
do not now see the visions or hear the sounds 
that once so moved them. 

The failure of the senses is not, however, so 
gradual as to be imperceptible in all cases. Crises 
come to many lives on the threshold of old age. 
Novelists choose, and rightly, to describe the drama 
of youth which ends in hope for this life ; but it 
is probable that both the inner and the outer 
experience of most people is fuller of dramatic 
struggle and suffering at about fifty than at any 
other time. Then their parents die, and they are 
anxious about their children, and less hopeful of 
achieving material ends as they find their powers 
beginning to fail. Work increases on their hands, 
not only for themselves, but for those older and 
those younger. They are in the thickest of the 
fight of life. There comes a strain, and they have 
not the strength to meet it. Yet they must meet it. 
And in the struggle a sense fails them. When 
this change comes suddenly, it is felt most keenly. 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 27 

Such losers know what they have lost. All such 
losses are more unbearable in the beginning, be- 
fore there has been time for adjustment to them. 
Now those whose senses have been sources of 
the greatest delight suffer most in losing them ; 
and yet, paradoxically, if they have used them 
aright, the delight remains. For example, two men 
lounging on a hillside look at the same landscape 
with strong, young eyes. One sees it carelessly, 
and notices little. He looks perhaps at a passing 
wagon or a heap of rubbish as often as at the dis- 
tant sea or the springing flowers at his feet. The 
other catches every varying tint of the ocean, every 
beautiful shadow from the moving clouds, every 
glint of sunshine through the over-arching trees, 
every exquisite tendril of the grapevine on the 
wall. When their eyes fail them, which loses most? 
Physically, the one who saw most. But, on the 
other hand, a mind so enriched as his has a trea- 
sure that cannot be touched by decay. If both 
these men should suffer blindness, and be led to the 
same spot again, which would see it most truly ? 
Even a new scene must be more beautiful to the 
one who had once discerned beauty truly. If a 



28 OLD PEOPLE 

friend says, u There is an apple-tree in blossom, 
and a bluebird has alighted on it," he sees the tree 
and the bird as if his eyes were open. But if he 
had never cared for apple-blossoms, except to won- 
der how many barrels of apples he should have to 
sell, he might not be able to recall the petals' 
lovely rose. 

Sight is more than a question of true lens and 
thrilling nerve. An old man of dim vision, if he 
has looked for beauty all his life, will find more 
loveliness in a landscape than a young man, with 
perfect eyes, looking at the scene with equal ear- 
nestness, even though in time the young man might 
learn to see all his companion cherishes. Complete 
beauty is not often revealed in a flash. It some- 
times seems to be, I know. When the train ap- 
proaching Lausanne emerges from the last long 
Alpine tunnel, and Lake Geneva bursts at once on 
the vision, with the line of snow-covered Savoy 
Alps beyond it, the summits touched with the 
crimson of sunset, the shining clouds and moun- 
tains reflected in softer colors in the lake, the 
whole world transfigured by the pulsating atmos- 
phere which holds the Alpine glow, changing 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 29 

moment by moment from silver to rose and from 
rose to violet, the most stolid men, under the sud- 
den shock of the glory, sometimes melt into tears. 
They see more than they know they see. I suppose 
no recollection, no imagination, could give a blind 
man all that is granted to one who sees in that 
single instant. He could remember what he knew 
he saw, but not the splendor he received uncon- 
sciously. This supreme glory does pass when the 
sense fails. No philosophy can save the old from 
loss. The fact of deprivation must be faced. Rec- 
ollection is not vision. 

But such a vision as that of the Swiss lake is 
rare in any life. It is still true that all the beauty 
of most scenes is perceived slowly by the reverent, 
watching mind; and though there is a great differ- 
ence in the power to see it in different young peo- 
ple, and many young people see more than many 
old ones, yet the same person, whose heart has re- 
mained pure, sees more actually at forty than he 
saw at twenty ; and even with the dim eyes of sev- 
enty, he sees what he did not at twenty. Yet no 
one knows so well as the one who has watched for 
beauty all his life that he has lost something real 



30 OLD PEOPLE 

when the sense fails. His recollection is a blending 
of anguish and blessedness. In the beginning, it 
seems as if the anguish would overpower the 
blessedness. Whether it conquers in the end will 
depend on the soul within. 

I have seen children in the meadows and woods 
in May, when the larks and bluebirds and spar- 
rows and thrushes were singing rapturously, who 
never once stopped picking flowers to listen to a 
single strain. I do not mean that the " blended 
notes of spring " did not enhance the charm of 
the moment. I am sure all this wild music sank 
into their hearts, and that they were better for 
having heard it, though unconsciously. And yet 
a deaf Thoreau, rambling through the same paths, 
would recognize a certain charm in the woods 
withheld from them. The scene might be as silent 
as a painted scene, but when a thrush flitted 
across the pathway, the deaf man would feel the 
rustle of the branches as he had once known it, 
and he would follow in his heart the song the 
bird sang, follow it actually. For the children, 
the happiness of the day would be unalloyed. 
To the man there would be a higher happiness, 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 31 

though its undercurrent would be pain. Perhaps 
a part of the sense is withdrawn, lest we should 
be overpowered by the " intolerable radiancy" 
which perfect senses would add to the rich vision 
of maturity. When the sibylline leaves were first 
offered to the people, they were many in number. 
Then, as more and more of them were lost, the 
value of the remaining ones increased. And so it 
is with the senses of the old. A single note of a 
thrush brings back to them the whole forest, with 
its trees and ferns and mosses, the rich colors of 
the sunset shining through the arches of the pines 
like the windows of a vast cathedral ; it brings 
back the feeling of the light breeze on the cheek, 
the murmuring of the leaves, the fragrance of 
innumerable living things, growing at our feet. A 
child may hear the full richness of the song that 
escapes the old man ; but the child must hear the 
song a thousand times before it means to him what 
it means to the old man. How could we bear at 
once both kinds of beauty in their fullness? 

The old are learning to do without this body. 
When the chrysalis can no longer hold the expand- 
ing soul, and breaks because of the strain within, 



32 OLD PEOPLE 

then, indeed, we may be ready for a finer body, 
wiljh new senses, and we may be able to bear the 
blending of inner and outer beauty. We may be 
prepared for the beauty that no human eye has 
seen. 

Have you ever thought how the loss of a sense 
gives us a great hope ? If you had never had the 
sense of hearing, you could not know that the 
spring woods are full of melody. Having had it 
and having lost it, you know that all the birds are 
singing, though the silence about you is like that 
of death. Why, then, may you not believe that 
some unknown sense might open at your feet 
worlds of beauty of which you have never had a 
single hint? You look into the microscope and 
see a clear, empty field. You turn a screw the 
hundredth part of an inch, and the drop of water 
is peopled by myriads of forms of curious and ex- 
quisite life. Is not the change of death more than 
the turning of a screw? The most faithless must be- 
lieve that even the outer world is a different thing 
to the butterfly from what it was to the worm. 

Perhaps nobody can ever have felt the anguish 
of deafness as Beethoven did. " He would never 



THE PASSING OF THE GLORY 33 

have written the high notes in the Hymn of Joy- 
in the Ninth Symphony if he could have heard 
them/' says a musical friend. " He would have 
known they were beyond any chorus." But what 
does that mean ? He perceived harmonies above 
the reach of the human voice and it was a Hymn 
of Joy. 

The glory of the senses passes indeed with 
youth ; but there is a glory of age which shines 
when the senses have failed. I am not now speak- 
ing of the glory of a pure soul, which is always 
independent of the material, but simply of the kind 
of glory revealed to us at first through the senses, 
and afterwards woven into the fibre of our very 
life. The glory that comes from love and truth in 
the heart never passes away at all, but shines 
brighter and brighter to the end : though it is true 
that when the mind also fails, we cannot follow the 
soul. There may be a hidden life, full of meaning, 
that no one outside it can see. There may still be 
an inner glory. Here we must wait in reverent 
silence. We do not comprehend ; but we must be- 
lieve that the glory of the terrestrial is one and 
the glory of the celestial is another. 



IV 

WORK 

Much of the best work of the world is done by 
men and women past sixty. It is true that great 
warriors are seldom very old ; but great statesmen 
are seldom very young. Most people who are en- 
dowed by nature with a strong body and a strong 
mind, and who have lived rationally, find the years 
between sixty and seventy among the most fruit- 
ful of all. No one seriously doubts this in the case 
of mental and moral achievement, for, though the 
memory begins to be less powerful in these years, 
the judgment becomes stronger, experience is 
necessarily wider, all good habits formed earlier be- 
come more and more a part of the individual, and 
one is equipped with material that is quite out of the 
reach of young people. Hokusai says : " Since I was 
six years old I have been in the habit of drawing 
the shapes of objects. Toward my fiftieth year I 
published an infinity of designs ; but I am not 
satisfied with anything I produced before my six- 



WORK 35 

tieth year. It is at my seventieth year that I am 
more or less able to understand the forms of birds, 
fishes, etc. ... At the age of one hundred and 
ten, everything from my brush, whatever it is, may 
be full of life." I suppose, however, that every 
reader of these last words will smile at the vain 
optimism of Hokusai, and make the mental com- 
ment that if he had lived to be one hundred and 
ten, his palsied fingers would no longer have been 
able to guide the brush, however vigorous his con- 
ception might still have been. For though we have 
all known centenarians who have kept the strength 
of their mind and heart to the last, we have not 
known very old people who have had the physical 
powers necessary for good manual work. 

Nevertheless, even in the matter of manual labor, 
I believe old people accomplish far more than we 
think, and that they could do still more if they had 
a little added encouragement. By this I do not 
mean that they. have the strength of maturity, or 
that they should be urged to work or criticised 
for idleness. Technical skill, such as Hokusai prog- 
nosticated for himself, is so rare after sixty — 
though there are still many instances where it is 



36 OLD PEOPLE 

maintained for a decade or two longer — that it may 
be disregarded altogether in a discussion like this, 
intended to apply to the rank and file. But what I 
mean is that the judgment and experience which 
the old put into their work often more than com- 
pensates, even in manual labor, for the weakness 
of the hand and eye. For example, I have known 
many old ladies who had been accomplished seam- 
stresses and who continued to set most beautiful 
stitches at eighty, though their hands were weak 
and their eyesight half gone, — stitches that their 
grand-daughters, brought up in an age of sewing 
machines, tried in vain to imitate. In such a case, 
we have the result of the long habit of beautiful 
work, and the judgment plays so small a part that 
the work is sometimes done when the mind is 
almost gone. It is excellent work, nevertheless, 
and contributes to the welfare of the world. I can 
hardly speak emphatically enough of the good 
that is done by some of my octogenarian friends 
who learned to sew in the days when all sewing had 
to be done by hand. They sit all day long in an 
armchair perhaps, too lame to walk out, too weak 
to stand, and one after another piece of w T ork is 



WORK 37 

swiftly and silently completed for the busy people 
who have not time or strength or skill to sew 
for themselves. There is a smile on their placid 
faces as they work : for they know they are doing 
what is of use and doing it well, and usually they 
have pleasant thoughts of the friend for whom 
they are busy. Perhaps this is the last generation 
that will ever see such work done. Even the young 
women who learn to sew now are not forced to it 
so constantly that it becomes a second nature, and 
their hand will lose its cunning much sooner in 
consequence. 

I have known a dear old lady almost ninety 
years of age who kept up her lifelong habit of 
cooking for her family, and to the last her cookery 
was the work of an artist. If I say that her mince- 
pies and her sugar gingerbread and her doughnuts 
were all incomparable, everybody in our village 
will know her name, for her food was not merely 
good, but actually the best. Now, though we may 
speak of cooking as a manual occupation, yet it is 
certainly something more than that. This dear old 
friend had very little bodily strength at the last. 
An incurable disease attacked her some years be- 



38 OLD PEOPLE 

fore her death, and during all these years, she was 
never once able to lie down. She slept sitting in 
her armchair, and she cooked sitting in her arm- 
chair. That she continued to cook well so that 
she could satisfy the wants of her beloved old 
husband and herself without the burden of a ser- 
vant was the result of her long life of intelligent 
activity. Her judgment was good, not only be- 
cause she had been endowed with a strong intel- 
lect to begin with, but because it was supplemented 
by character, and she had practiced faithfully 
what she knew to be best her whole life long. 

One splendid old lady who lived to be ninety-one, 
spent her last dozen years traveling in Europe 
and the South, and wherever she went she taught 
new branches of industry. She was over eighty 
when she learned to crochet ; but her work was so 
beautiful that the shawls she made were fit for 
heirlooms. She helped a poor Swiss woman to 
become independent for life by teaching her the 
art of crocheting these shawls. Wherever she 
went in the South and saw women wearing them- 
selves out over fires to bake hot biscuit three times 
a day, she straightway set herself at work to 



WORK 39 

show them how to make the most excellent yeast 
bread. 

A year ago, when I was driving through a 
neighboring village with some friends, we wished 
to climb a hill. The easiest way to reach it was 
through the vegetable garden of an old gentleman 
known to one of the party, and she asked the de- 
sired permission. As we passed the kitchen door, 
a handsome old lady came out and greeted us. It 
was Monday morning, and she was doing her own 
washing : yet I speak advisedly when I call her a 
lady. No one could deny that title to the tall, 
aristocratic-looking woman, with her gracious man- 
ners. Her beautiful gray hair was simply and be- 
comingly arranged, her calico dress was neat and 
well-fitting. Her sleeves were rolled up above her 
elbows, and her strong, sinewy arms showed that 
she had worked all her life ; but if she had put on 
a long-sleeved silk dress, I think she could have 
taken her place fittingly in any society in the 
land. She was a woman of intellect, and her con- 
versation was full of acumen. I was astonished 
when my friend said she was nearly eighty years 
old. It is not every old lady of eighty who has 



40 OLD PEOPLE 

the strength to do washing. Furthermore, it is 
not every housekeeper who can be unembarrassed 
in receiving a party of strangers at ten o'clock on 
Monday morning, knowing that both her house 
and herself are in perfect order. Now this old 
lady was not strong. She died within the year. 
What she was able to achieve to the very last was 
the result of her cheerful, unremitting work all 
through her youth and middle age. 

Because the women I have described could do 
so much in age, it must not be supposed that all 
women could equal them. Even of those who 
might have been their peers in middle life, and 
who had had a lifetime of experience to help 
them, many must have become disabled much ear- 
lier, and of course no woman could win distinction 
in household occupations who began her appren- 
ticeship too late. Another very important consid- 
eration is that these women all worked in their 
own homes, and were untrammeled by directions 
or criticisms. They worked with regularity, it is 
true, and yet with a sense of perfect freedom. If 
they were tired and decided to rest, nobody would 
make any comment. If they chose to have bread 



WORK 41 

and milk for dinner, they acted according to their 
own good pleasure. If they were too weak to do 
the washing on Monday, it could be done on 
Tuesday equally well. If their eyes were too dim 
to sew on a rainy day, they could put by their 
needlework till the sun shone. I say all this be- 
cause I feel that while the old are all the healthier 
and happier for working to their full strength in 
freedom, it is cruel to urge them, and I do not 
think younger people always understand that. It 
is not until we are weak ourselves that we are able 
to comprehend weakness. I have heard strong 
young women criticise some aged relative whose 
last years must be spent in their homes, declaring 
that half the infirmities of age could be avoided if 
the old would do a little wholesome work. This is 
partly true. Exercise is needed even when it re- 
quires an effort to take it, and the interest in life 
that comes from work for others not only makes 
us forget our ills but often actually eradicates 
them. But no strong person can prescribe the 
amount of exercise good for a weak one, and the 
attempt to do so often causes unavailing pain. The 
ideal that the old should set before themselves is 



42 OLD PEOPLE 

faithful work according to their strength. In this 
the young should encourage them. Let the old do 
whatever they think they can do ; but do not ask 
them to undertake anything merely as work. 
Every human being longs for freedom. If children 
are allowed too much freedom, it may lead to mis- 
chief; but the old have earned the right to be free. 
In our village, and in most other villages, I 
suppose, nineteen out of every twenty men culti- 
vate a garden in the hours before and after their 
daily work. When they grow old, and find their 
regular work too heavy for them, many still tend 
the garden. A very little digging and a very little 
weeding suffice ; but they know when to plant and 
what to plant, so that many of the best gardens in 
the region are those of superannuated men. They 
like their work, it is healthful, it gives them an 
interest, and the produce is a decided help in 
making the ends meet. More than that, in many 
cases, the old gentlemen take pleasure in supply- 
ing their neighbors with fine, fresh vegetables. 
Perhaps not one of these men could do a satisfac- 
tory day's work under an employer; but working 
alone and freely, they accomplish something well 



WORK 43 

worth doing, and are the happier for it. Health, 
fresh air, the life of nature, productive labor, and 
the power to make generous and beautiful and 
useful gifts, — all these things come from the 
cultivation of the garden. 

The more the body fails, the more the mind 
must supplement it. It can hardly be wrong to 
mention here by name the elder Doctor William 
Perry of Exeter, New Hampshire, since, living to 
the age of ninety-eight, he was known as a public 
man to several generations. I think he was already 
past ninety when, being alone in the house one 
day, he had the misfortune to fall and break his 
ankle. What did the old doctor do? It never en- 
tered his mind to wait until help came to him. He 
had been too prompt and efficient all his life for 
that. He picked himself up as well as he could, 
worked his way to his surgical instruments, and 
set his ankle properly before any of the family 
reached home. 

How old is Patti? Those who heard her sing 
in youth say she has lost some notes of her un- 
equaled voice ; but art comes to her aid and makes 
it still possible for her to sing. And I know a 



44 OLD PEOPLE 

singer who has never appeared in public who, at 
sixty-seven, sings with a purity and perfection few 
young artists can approach. Still, of course, no 
one past fifty can count much on accomplishing 
anything that depends chiefly on bodily activity. 
If one lives long, the body always fails. Some- 
times the mind fails too, but most people keep 
their mental powers until very near the end of 
life ; though the memory usually weakens a little 
so that one hesitates over names, in a large 
number of cases the higher powers of the mind 
go on ripening to the last. That is the reason, I 
say, that so much of the best work in the world 
is done by those past sixty. It is thought that 
about eighty of the hundred and thirteen plays 
of Sophocles were written after he was sixty; 
and, as the earliest of these matchless plays now 
known to us is believed to have been brought 
out when he was fifty-five, we cannot think that 
his earlier plays excelled the later ones. Indeed, 
the CEdijnts at Colonos, his last play, written at 
the age of ninety, is usually ranked as his greatest 
work. Yet while he was writing it a son sought 
to place him under guardianship, on the ground 



WORK 45 

that he was sinking into the imbecility of age, a 
charge to which, one of his biographers suggests, 
color was given by the decay of his physical 
strength, and perhaps his very absorption in his 
art. His only answer was to read to the court the 
wonderful chorus he had just written, describing 
Colonos, his native place, and to ask whether that 
gave signs of a weakened intellect. The court 
burst into applause, and he was free. 

Euripides did not live to the age of Sophocles ; 
but he was still producing great plays when he 
died at seventy-five. Even though the critics may 
be right in accusing him of sacrificing something 
of art to emotion in his later plays, yet, if Iphige- 
nia in Aulis was among his last works, as is 
thought, his power to appreciate and portray char- 
acter had certainly lost nothing with the years. 

The more I read biography, the more I am in- 
clined to think that poetry tends to long life. 
Though Shakspeare died at fifty-two, most poets 
have lived long, and written worthily to the end. 
Goethe, the greatest German of the last century, 
Tennyson and Browning, the greatest English 
poets of recent times, are instances in point. 



46 OLD PEOPLE 

Great novelists seem often to die early, the 
Brontes and Miss Austen almost in youth, Thack- 
eray and Dickens between fifty and sixty, and 
Scott and George Eliot at about sixty — perhaps 
because the wear and tear of feeling necessary to 
make their characters live is less sustained by a 
serene vision of the purely ideal. I believe Du 
Maurier was past sixty when he, an artist in an- 
other field, astonished the world by writing Peter 
Ibbetson and Trilby. No one should forget the 
wonderful achievement of Mrs. Trollope. Her 
son Anthony says of her : " She continued writ- 
ing up to 1856 when she was seventy-six years 
old, and had at that time produced one hundred 
and fourteen volumes, of which the first was not 
written till she was fifty." These volumes were 
not all novels ; some were travels, a much easier 
kind of writing. What Trollope says about his 
mother gives a key to her remarkable accomplish- 
ment. "Her power of dividing herself into two 
parts, and keeping her intellect by itself, clear 
from the troubles of the world, and fit for the 
duty it had to do, I never saw equaled. I do not 
think that the writing of a novel is the most dif- 



WORK 47 

ficult task a man may be called upon to do ; but 
it is a task that may be supposed to demand a 
spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with 
a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott. My 
mother went through it unscathed in strength, 
though she performed all the work of day-nurse 
and night-nurse to a sick household. . . . She 
was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industri- 
ous woman, with great capacity for enjoyment, 
and high physical gifts." 

Gladstone's work as a statesman when he was 
more than fourscore will always be remembered. 

Not long ago we were all watching the aston- 
ishing fight for life made by Pope Leo XIII at 
ninety-four, and we remember that most of his 
admirable and enlightened policy was the work of 
one who had passed the traditional threescore 
years and ten. 

These great men all had strong bodies. Every- 
body knows how Gladstone chopped down trees 
to the very last. But while any strong young man 
can chop down trees, Gladstone himself as a young 
man could not have done the great work of Glad- 
stone as an old man. And the Pope's aged body 



48 OLD PEOPLE 

is described as almost transparent, while his mind 
worked vigorously to the end. 

Our own country will always remember with 
enthusiasm its remarkable group of octogenarian 
women — at their head, Mrs. Livermore and Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe — who at no time relinquished 
the idea of ceasing to work for the great ideals to 
which their lives have been devoted. I know in 
private life several women, their contemporaries, 
who, in office work, in carrying on the business of 
great institutions, in guiding and directing other 
people, still accomplish results out of the reach 
of the young. I feel that examples from private 
life always help us more than those of distin- 
guished men and women, though they are less 
dazzling : because genius is a factor in most cases 
of distinction, or, at least, there is some excep- 
tional power of mind or body which leads us to 
feel that such examples cannot be followed by 
those of smaller endowment. Character is the only 
thing within reach of us all, and that must go on 
ripening to the end. 

I knew a lovely woman whose life had been a 
daily blessing, not only to her own friends, but to 



WORK 49 

the whole community, whose work went on to the 
very day of her death. She had been gradually 
failing for many months, and she could no longer 
leave her home ; but the various committees of all 
the chief organizations in town met in her parlor 
because her judgment was invaluable on every 
subject that came up. She was the one person in 
the town who, in virtue of a long life lived there 
in useful activity, knew everybody in such a way 
that she could carry out any desirable scheme. A 
friend went to see her one morning to ask her 
advice about some new plan, and found that she 
was not able to leave her bed. The friend would 
have withdrawn at once, but the invalid sent word 
that she was able to see her, and though very weak, 
she listened intelligently to the plan and gave her 
opinion clearly. In a few hours she died. When 
she received her friend the end was beginning, 
and she knew it. 

" The action won such reverence meet, 
As hid all measure of the feat." 

When she was gone the whole village realized that 
no one could take her place. The frailty of her 
body had counted for absolutely nothing, because 



50 OLD PEOPLE 

she was so wise. She had been useful as an active 
young woman, she had been useful in the work 
by which in earlier days she had earned her living-, 
but, as she grew old, she became indispensable. 

" My gray hair is worth while," said a charming 
woman who has grown gray early. " It is proper 
for me to do so many things I used to hesitate 
about." The special occasion that called out this 
remark was an alumnae dinner where the guests 
unfortunately happened to belong to classes so 
widely separated that the affair threatened to be 
dull and formal until my gray-haired friend ven- 
tured to move gently from one to another, intro- 
ducing herself, finding out the name and place of 
each, and putting the schoolmate in communica- 
tion with some congenial spirit. My friend was not 
the oldest woman present, but her gray hair gave 
her the privilege of making the whole party happy. 
I know an old lady who says that in her early 
days she was of no use in her village because she 
was alwaj's too timid to express her own opinion, but 
that now her power to help is trebled because she 
has no hesitation in laying down the law to the 
active young people she has known from their 



WORK 51 

cradles. As she lays down the law very sweetly, 
her hearers usually accept it with a good grace. 

A part of the very best work the old do is done 
unconsciously — indeed unintentionally. Their 
weakness and dependence make claim not to be set 
aside by younger people, and perhaps most of those 
who have ever had the care of the old could testify 
that this experience has been of untold value in 
forming their own characters. I am sure this is 
always so when the old person, becoming dependent, 
meets the changed conditions of life by making 
the best of them, and where the younger person has 
a strong sense of duty. But though some of the 
work done by the old can be done by them only, 
yet we have to admit that for most of us the active 
work of our lives must be done before we are 
old, and that while some of us retain all our powers 
much longer than others, yet it is rare, indeed, 
that any one lives very long without having to un- 
dergo the discipline of relinquishing all work for 
a time. Of the pangs of disappointed ambition 
endured as we realize that we shall never do the 
great things we had planned, it is perhaps not worth 
while to speak. Suffer as we may, — and most of 



52 OLD PEOPLE 

us do suffer acutely from this cause, — all who 
have a true ideal know that this suffering is ig- 
noble, and would choose, if they might, the dis- 
cipline that eradicates the baneful weed of ambi- 
tion from their garden. If we really wish to do a 
noble deed, we shall work heartily till our strength 
fails, and then rejoice that u others shall right 
the wrong." If we have in us the deep springs of 
poetry and music, we shall be content that " others 
shall sing the song." 

But the more one has loved to work, the more 
one has prized the sense of independence and the 
joy of being of service to others, the harder it is 
to submit to the discipline that comes from find- 
ing we can work no more. Independence we must 
learn to forego. We must be purged from the last 
germ of pride. The delight of helping others 
must be given up. We must learn to leave our 
dearest in the care of a higher love than ours. 



EARNING A LIVING 

It is one thing to regard the work of the old 
simply as useful activity : but to many old people 
the chief problem of life is how to earn a living, 
and that demands something more than useful 
activity. It requires that our work should have a 
money value recognized by those who can pay us 
for it. Not all are called upon to face this problem. 
A Sophocles who can write an CEdipus at Colonos 
at ninety, need not be troubled by it, nor even a 
Du Maurier who can produce a Trilby at sixty. 
The services of statesmen and doctors and lawyers 
are prized more and more with advancing years. 
Bishops and archbishops are valued in proportion 
as they are venerable, and Leo XIII, at ninety-four, 
had no occasion for anxiety as to whether he was 
growing too feeble for his task. A merchant in 
control of his own business, a farmer who carries 
on his own farm, a teacher at the head of a private 
school, need not fear to be deposed, at least, until 



54 OLD PEOPLE 

the power of work has really failed, and even then 
it will probably be possible to earn a modest live- 
lihood till the end is near. 

So long as one can take the initiative in work, 
though life may be a struggle, there is little dan- 
ger of want. An old gentleman I knew was living 
very comfortably on the various small rents from 
a business block in his own village when, one win- 
ter night, a fire swept the block out of existence. 
The building was an old one, and the insurance 
on it was very small. Now some men of seventy- 
five would have thought there was nothing to be 
done but to live as sparingly as possible on the 
insurance as long as it lasted, and then, if life 
should unhappily be prolonged, to ask for help 
from the town. But the next day, this slight sil- 
ver-haired old gentleman walked calmly up the 
street and surveyed the ruins with an intelligent 
eye, and in a few days more, he mentioned that, 
with the help of his insurance and a mortgage that 
a neighboring bank would take on the property, 
he would rebuild in the spring. The new build- 
ing was a great improvement on the old, and 
every room in it was occupied as soon as com- 



EAENING A LIVING 55 

pleted. The old gentleman, however, was hampered 
by a mortgage that many a young man would have 
hesitated to assume. He therefore reserved for 
himself one room in the new building and opened 
a little grocery. He was not very strong or very 
active, but he succeeded in doing a small business, 
and it never seemed to occur to him that he could 
be an object for either pity or help. He pursued the 
even tenor of his way about ten years. Instead 
of being in the poorhouse then, he was an esteemed 
citizen of the town, and in the meantime he had 
paid off his mortgage. Do you think that at the 
end of ten years he died? By no means. But 
about that time, the new building in its turn was 
burned. Our friend this time made no more com- 
plaint than he had before; but he apparently 
thought his increasing infirmities made it hardly 
desirable for him to incur a further debt, and he 
left the building of the block to a younger man. 
However, he was not yet convinced that it was 
time for him to retire from active life, and he 
straightway set up a tiny little store on a waste 
lot of land and continued his business as a grocer. 
Hear this, ye who talk mournfully about the 
" dead line of fifty." 



56 OLD PEOPLE 

The problem of earning a living seems to press 
most heavily on salaried persons and wage-earners, 
for in most cases they have had little experience in 
taking the initiative, and often, indeed, they are 
incapable of beginning a new kind of work when 
they can no longer do that to which they are ac- 
customed. 

It is a little curious that old ministers are dif- 
ferently rated from old lawyers or old doctors. An 
old minister ought to be more valuable than a 
young one, because his experience of life must 
give him an insight into truth and a power to help 
those struggling towards the light, such as no 
young man can have. Yet most congregations find 
it easier to pay a salary to a young man who will 
say something bright and fresh in the pulpit, and 
who has the strength for an active social life. 

Old teachers are seldom in demand. College 
professors who have special knowledge, and prin- 
cipals of schools armed with executive ability, may 
work to advantage till after seventy ; but the daily 
fret of the nerves produced by the actual grappling 
with one generation of children after another — 
the best of children having a constitutional and 



EARNING A LIVING 57 

perennial objection to doing the tasks laid down 
for them by their pastors and masters — wears out 
the subordinate teachers in a comparatively short 
time, and few can continue their work after sixty. 

We all concede that a good nurse does a patient 
more good than a good doctor, and the judgment 
and skill of a nurse count for much even when the 
body fails; yet while many doctors pursue their 
profession till they reach fourscore, it is said the 
average active life of a nurse is only ten years. 

Stenography makes large demands on the brain ; 
yet stenographers are often looked upon as out of 
the race after forty-five, because so few of them 
keep the bodily strength to endure the mad rush 
of office life after that time. 

And if brain workers find themselves hors de 
combat so long before the natural period of their 
days, is it not still worse for the vast multitude who 
depend on their bodily labor alone for a support? 

Fortunately, physical labor, unaccompanied by 
worry, seems to strengthen the body, so that it 
may be continued in most cases until late in life. 
If a man can go on working until his children can 
work for themselves, he may still be able to do 



58 OLD PEOPLE 

the lighter tasks necessary to support himself and 
his wife ; and if his wife has, in her stronger days, 
kept house for the whole family, she will probably 
not feel overwhelmed in her age by providing for 
her husband and herself. To use Emerson's expres- 
sion, we must "take in sail" in old age, and in many 
cases, this is all that is needed that we may pursue 
our voyage in safety. Most workers have saved a 
trifle by the time they are sixty, and though few 
have income enough to live upon, they make the 
income and principal together carry them through 
a good many years, and if they have children, these 
come to the rescue at the last, so that few industri- 
ous and prudent workers have to depend on char- 
ity, though unfortunately many of them suffer anx- 
ious hours when the almshouse looms before them. 
They do not like to handicap their children, though 
in point of fact, the children who are early called 
on to help their parents form habits of careful ex- 
penditure, which give them a great advantage all 
through life. 

For the workers who have no children to look 
to in an emergency, it seems doubly necessary to 
secure a competency before the evil days, wherein 



EARNING A LIVING 59 

work is impossible, shall overtake them. Yet my 
own observation leads me to think that few, even 
among the sober and industrious, do succeed in lay- 
ing aside enough to live upon in even the most 
frugal way. Wages are never very far beyond the 
immediate needs of life, rates of interest in savings 
banks are very low, and those with small means 
and without business experience cannot invest 
elsewhere without great risk ; moreover, the most 
phlegmatic plodder longs for a " good time " now 
and then, and spends the dollar he might save if 
he were a mere machine. Then there are always 
calls to which the large-hearted cannot be deaf, 
from the poor, the old, and the invalids; so the 
years pass on, and the body breaks down, and 
the balance in the bank is very small. What is 
to be done? 

I do not think the situation is often as bad as 
it seems to be. There is a great deal of love in the 
world, and people are heartily disposed to help 
one another. A maiden aunt with a thousand or 
two dollars dies, and leaves a few hundred here 
and a few hundred there to relatives who would 
otherwise be destitute. There is almost always 



60 OLD PEOPLE 

some generous member of every family who can 
help out at the extreme pinch. The number of 
paupers who do not deserve pauperism is astonish- 
ingly small when we think of the number of peo- 
ple who are poor and anxious. It is the anxiety 
which makes the tragedy of the situation ; and 
though there are those so happily endowed by 
nature, or so firmly upheld by religious faith that 
they can put aside anxiety, yet, for a great num- 
ber of people the last years of life will be over- 
shadowed by it unless some plan can be devised to 
find remunerative employment for those who have 
been good workers but who are no longer capable 
of doing a full stint. He who can devise such a 
plan will be a great public benefactor. The world 
needs every worker. A man who can no longer 
do a whole day's work should not be forced to sit 
idle the half day he could work, and endure the 
humiliation of asking the town to feed him. He 
himself would be the better for the work, and the 
community would be the better for it. 

Probably any amelioration of these conditions 
will come gradually, not through socialistic mea- 
sures on a large scale, but by means of the personal 



EARNING A LIVING 61 

interest felt by large employers of labor in their 
individual workmen. Two or three years ago there 
was in a report of the superintendent of Boston 
schools, a thoughtful discussion of the problem 
of superannuated teachers. Of course schools exist 
for the scholars and not for the teachers, and it 
is always wrong to retain an incompetent teacher 
whatever her virtues or necessities may be. But 
the superintendent pointed out that in the case of 
those who have been good teachers in the past, the 
power to do some good work remains, even when 
the strength is not equal to full work, and he 
suggested that schedules should be so arranged as 
to give a little work at a small salary to retiring 
teachers who are still able to do it. I do not 
know whether such a suggestion was ever acted 
upon, but it seems to be a good one. Of course, in 
the case of a teacher growing deaf or blind, or of 
one whose nerves have been rasped until she no 
longer has the right moral influence over her pu- 
pils, such a plan would not be feasible. But there 
are many cases where the lightening of labor 
would be all the change necessary for the best 
results to both teacher and pupils. 



62 OLD PEOPLE 

It has often occurred to me that a good work 
might be done by superannuated teachers if any- 
body could be found to inaugurate it. Any teacher 
who has studied all her life is sure to have some 
favorite subject of investigation about which her 
knowledge is greater than that of most people. 
This subject she could teach to adult evening 
classes, either in the form of lectures or conver- 
sations. All through the small towns of our coun- 
try such classes are needed, and yet few of the 
young people who ought to join them would be 
likely at the outset to feel enough interest in them 
to pay for the instruction, and few elderly teachers, 
in straitened circumstances, have the strength or 
the means to persevere until the classes could 
be put on a self-supporting basis. Moreover, all 
teachers of children have not the power of pre- 
senting a subject to grown people in an interesting 
way. Now, it seems to me, if some educational so- 
ciety would take up this matter, arranging courses 
of study in a group of neighboring towns, guaran- 
teeing expenses and a small compensation to the 
teacher while making the fee to the pupils merely 
nominal, that in a few years such classes would 



EARNING A LIVING C3 

become popular and self-supporting, and be the 
means of introducing a much wider culture into 
country towns than is likely otherwise to be found 
there. 

This is only one suggestion, made because I 
happen to know personally something of teachers 
and something of country towns. Those who are 
interested in other occupations and in larger 
places, will doubtless see for themselves what can 
be done in other directions. At present there is a 
great and unnecessary waste in the resources of 
the nation because old people who cannot do much 
have no opportunity to do what they can. 

And yet, if we might have our way, we should 
wish that nobody who is old should be obliged to 
earn a living. The best work of all is spontaneous, 
and much work that is sorely needed in the world 
is done spontaneously by old people who are re- 
leased from the necessity of work. 



VI 

ON KEEPING YOUNG 

To some Nature gives a youthful body so strong 
and elastic that it defies years. Mrs. Gilbert, for 
example, over eighty years of age, was still appear- 
ing on the stage, and in Mice and Men, at least, 
she did not fear to dance. I know a gentleman 
who, at eighty-two, still goes to the theatre twice 
a week. He does not " feel old." A lady of ninety- 
three has just died in my own neighborhood who 
insisted on doing her own housework to the last, 
and who often walked four or five miles as re- 
creation. But while we may give thanks for such 
a youthful body, it is not vouchsafed to all, though 
happily most of us need not count ourselves in 
exactly the same class as Catherine Seyton's aunt 
whom Scott speaks of as u an aged woman of fifty." 

How are the rank and file to keep young? 

Here is Emerson's prescription : " A walk in the 
woods is one of the secrets of dodging old age." 
That will not appeal to all, especially in these days 



ON KEEPING YOUNG 65 

when so few seem to have learned to walk in the 
woods even in youth. But for those who know 
the charm, there is nothing like it. Fresh, fragrant 
air, gentle exercise, — vigorous exercise, if you 
choose, — a constant succession of beautiful sights 
and sounds, contact with living, growing plants 
and animals, rest and recreation for mind and body, 
all these may be had from a walk in the woods. 

" What do you think my wife and I have been 
doing to-day?" said a smiling old gentleman. 
" We two old people, more than seventy years old, 
have been spending the whole day in the woods!" 
His face glowed with a sort of triumph. He had 
found the way to health and happiness. Now health 
and happiness have a great deal to do in keeping 
us young and also in keeping us beautiful. 

For health, I suppose the simplest prescriptions 
are the best, — fresh air, wholesome food, not quite 
so rich or abundant as in the earlier years, useful 
occupations in which we are interested without 
being goaded either by necessity or ambition, and 
rest when we are tired. All moderate exercise in 
the open air is good. I like to see old people play 
croquet as they learned it in youth. All who row 



66 OLD PEOPLE 

in youth, row in age, though not so fast or so far. 
A few years ago, thousands of old people began 
to feel that they were about to renew their youth 
by means of the bicycle. You saw them at every 
rink, wheeling enthusiastically round and round 
the course. There is, in fact, no exercise so exhila- 
rating, none that makes the years drop away so 
quickly. Nevertheless, the old people did not per- 
severe in riding. They gave it up even before it 
went out of fashion. Probably most of them learned 
the art indoors, on a perfectly smooth floor, and 
when they began to ride in the open air the first 
step upward disconcerted them. Perhaps they fell, 
and realized that old bones are brittle. Then they 
really had not the strength of the youngsters. 
Nevertheless, I know many old people who take 
great satisfaction in a wheel. They learned to ride 
on the road, and had to encounter the good-na- 
tured laughter of their neighbors while learning. 
But when they had learned they knew their ground, 
and were under no illusions as to what they could 
do. Most of them content themselves with short 
spins of half a dozen miles. Two or three together 
go on these little trips, tucking a luncheon and a 



ON KEEPING YOUNG 67 

book into the bicycle bag, and so they explore 
fresh woods and pastures new on every side, and 
find a constant interest in life, the wheel extending 
their horizon beyond that of their walks, and giv- 
ing them a sense of freedom and independence 
wanting in either carriage drives or trolley trips. 
But those who try to rival the young and ride fifty 
miles a day, soon retire from the contest disheart- 
ened. For in pleasure as in work, the old must 
remember 

" It is time to be old, 
To take in sail." 

But it is not in the body alone, or chiefly, that 
we keep young. 

il Life is but thought, and think I will 
That youth and I are housemates still." 

So writes a friend who is growing old, quoting 
Coleridge. I think this friend will always keep 
her youth, though her hair is white and she has 
already many of the infirmities of age. Her mind 
is always open to new truth, and it has a fresh- 
ness and vigor scarcely to be found in the young. 
Thinking about things worth thinking about keeps 
us young. 



68 OLD PEOPLE 

An old gentleman writing to his daughter on 
his seventy-fourth birthday, which occurred in mid- 
winter, says, " I celebrated the day by climbing 
the hill behind the house to see the sunrise this 
morning, or rather, / ran up the hill. Do you 
believe you can do as much when you are as old ? " 
I like to think of this sweet, clean, wholesome 
old man who felt that the rising sun was a pageant 
worth the effort of climbing a hill on a cold, dark 
winter morning. What more splendid spectacle 
could have been devised to honor the day that 
marked his weight of years ? He was not very 
strong, and this was his last birthday in the pre- 
sent life ; but he was young to the end, for he had 
not lost the power of enthusiasm for the beauty 
that is within the reach of every one of us. 

I remember an old lady whose busy life as the 
wife of a country minister had prevented her study- 
ing much after her girlhood till she was more 
than sixty years old. Her active mind, well-stored 
in youth, had not been idle through middle age, 
but it had been exercised chiefly on the most imme- 
diately practical matters, though she had never 
lost her interest in poetry, history, and public 



ON KEEPING YOUNG 69 

affairs. The last twenty years of her life, how- 
ever, gave her much leisure. She was an inmate of 
her daughter's family, and though she was far too 
helpful a woman to abandon useful work, yet she 
had many hours that must have been lonely ones 
if she had not kept a deep interest in reading. She 
was not ambitious, she had no wish to be a learned 
woman. She had no scruples about amusing her- 
self, and she read a very large number of good 
novels in these later days, — Trollope and Mrs. 
Oliphant meeting her wants better than most other 
novelists, for she liked a long, quiet story that was 
sure to turn out well, with characters sufficiently 
like the people she knew in real life, and moreover 
she liked to have the characters well-bred. She 
thought about these characters and discussed them 
with a spirit unknown to novel readers who do not 
think. But she also did a vast amount of other 
reading, chiefly in the direction of history and 
biography, and by the time she was eighty years 
old it would have been hard to find another woman, 
old or young, who could have told you as much 
as she of the lives and characters of our American 
statesmen, from Washington and Jefferson down 



70 OLD PEOPLE 

to Cleveland and Roosevelt, or of the English kings 
and queens from William the Conqueror and Ma- 
tilda of Flanders to Edward VII and Alexandra, 
or of the French writers of memoirs, Madame de 
Genlis and Madame d' Abrantes. She had the gen- 
ealogy of all the royal personages of Europe at 
her tongue's end. 

For the last half dozen years of her life, she 
suffered from a wasting disease that prevented 
her going out much to see her friends, though 
I can assure you she was much too vigorous in 
mind and heart to miss any opportunity within 
her reach ; but she had enough interesting peo- 
ple to think about from the books she read, and 
as she read aloud most agreeably, she was able to 
share her books with her daughter and grand- 
daughter, so that they all had plenty of people to 
talk about without descending to gossip. Still I 
do not mean that she was above taking an interest 
in the affairs of her neighbors. 

I have heard many people, speaking quite inde- 
pendently of one another, say of this old lady that 
she " grew old gracefully." And certainly she re- 
tained a great charm, even when age and disease 



ON KEEPING YOUNG 71 

had destroyed all the fresh beauty by which she 
had once been characterized, except that her dark 
blue eyes never faded. It was partly thought that 
kept her young, but still more love : for she was a 
large-hearted, ardent woman. 

And this brings us to the best of all prescrip- 
tions for keeping young, — Love. Indeed, we 
might begin with love, and perhaps not go any 
farther, so much is included in it. While we are 
thinking of ourselves we shrivel and fade, but 
when we are thoroughly interested in other people, 
we glow with life. Love is immortal, and when we 
have won love, we have transcended the body. 
Age can no longer wither us. We need not fear 
anything it can do. How commonplace this sounds ! 
It cannot be put into words because it must be 
lived ; but every one who has once understood that 
love is life, every one who has learned in ever so 
slight a degree to push his own selfishness aside, 
will know that with love we enter into the eternal 
life, and that age no longer fetters us. 



VII 

OUTWARD BEAUTY 

" Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt 
this place/' says Socrates, at the conclusion of 
Phaedrus, "give me beauty in the inward soul : and 
may the outward and inward man be at one." 

The inward man is usually, I think, more beau- 
tiful in age than in youth. Indeed, one of Brown- 
ing's characters says that the young are made 
beautiful in order that we may be able to love 
them before they have anything in them worth 
loving ; but outward beauty is granted to very 
few old people, though there is a grand and noble 
expression and bearing best set off by white hairs, 
and old faces often have a meaning denied to the 
young. 

" The lean and slippered pantaloon," the " big, 
manly voice" that turns "again toward childish 
treble " and " pipes and whistles in his sound," 
and the condition of being " sans teeth, sans eyes, 
sans taste, sans everything " is very far from out- 



OUTWARD BEAUTY 73 

ward beauty. And with the failure of our powers 
comes new difficulty in making the most of what 
remains. When the hand trembles and the eye 
grows dim, neatness is no longer a matter of 
course. A rich old lady with a skillful maid may 
still be exquisite ; but the rank and file of old ladies 
must face a different condition of things. The 
difficulty of looking well is very much increased 
for those whose means will not admit of suitable 
dress, and this is often the case when the power 
to earn is lost. 

In one of Tolstoi's novels he describes in a pain- 
fully real way the repulsion felt by a young girl 
for her old father. The old man longed to have 
his daughter near him, but " the sour breath of 
age " was repugnant to her. In reading the story 
one is made to feel that old people must be physi- 
cally repulsive, and no doubt there are many old 
people whose most strenuous efforts cannot save 
them from such a calamity. But we can all bring 
to mind many clean, fresh, sweet old gentlemen 
and ladies whose children and grandchildren love 
to nestle about them, and we feel that Tolstoi's 
merciless pen was not, after all, a truthful one. Of 



74 OLD PEOPLE 

course affection is constantly triumphing over phy- 
sical impediments ; but I am thinking now of men 
and women who are attractive even to strangers. 

It seems to me that perfect cleanliness and 
sweetness are perhaps of tener attained by old men 
than by old women, possibly because they live 
more out of doors. But it is probably never 
reached by any old person who does not definitely 
strive for it. 

I believe the young usually judge the old very 
severely as wanting in neatness. They think their 
grandfathers and grandmothers are careless be- 
cause there are spots on their coats and dresses, 
stains on their hands, frayed button-holes, shoes 
unevenly laced. They wonder how the old people 
can be so untidy, and they look complacently on 
their own trim boots and spotless robes. It is im- 
possible for bright eyes to realize that dim eyes 
do not see. The old people who are criticised have 
often striven to the point of nervousness to make 
a satisfactory toilet when the grandchildren have 
hardly more than jumped into their clothes. One 
spot on the dress of the youngsters means more 
carelessness than twenty spots on the dress of 



OUTWARD BEAUTY 75 

their grandmother. Nevertheless, the young peo- 
ple look neat. 

Some old people do not know their own fail- 
ings. They do not see, but they do not know that 
they do not see. They are hurt and even angry 
when their young people try to set them right. 
They insist that they are clean and tidy when the 
young people are suffering agonies of mortifica- 
tion on their behalf. They stand before their mir- 
rors and brush their hair, and do not guess that 
the parting is awry. When the time comes that 
we cannot see ourselves plainly in a glass, we can- 
not have much satisfaction in our own neatness. 
Even when we take such pains to make ourselves 
neat that we actually succeed, most of us are 
haunted by a question as to the result. We do not 
know how we look, and we cannot trust our best 
friends to tell us the exact truth. In fact, we 
hardly dare ask them for it, lest we should not 
be able to bear it. 

And yet we wish to look our best, both for our 
own sake and for that of other people. We can 
perhaps still see how other people look and so 
know how we ought to look. Let us do our best. 



76 OLD PEOPLE 

Our best is often very unsatisfactory ; but when 
we have really done it, we may comfort ourselves 
with the dictum of the disciples of the mind cure : 
" / am still neat, still beautiful, though I prob- 
ably look to others slovenly and ugly." I fear none 
of us can say this truthfully unless we are willing 
to submit to a good many comments from our 
young people. Happy are the old people whose 
young people make all their criticisms in a spirit 
of love. Of the two great qualities on which char- 
acter rests, truth and love, I fear that love is of 
the slower growth, and that most young people 
are more convinced of the need of being truthful 
in their criticisms than of administering them in 
a healing spirit. Indeed, perhaps the young people 
are not alone here, for do those of us who are 
gray-haired choose all our words with care when 
we see fit to admonish our youth ? 

No life is well rounded wherein there is not a 
shrine for the Beautiful as well as for the True 
and the Good. But a great many people who think 
they care for beauty have no real love for it. Many 
whose physical endowment, supplemented by the 



OUTWARD BEAUTY 77 

vanity which keeps their dress always abreast of 
the fashion, makes them appear beautiful in their 
early years, have no ideal to guide them in age. 
They try desperately to hold each fleeting charm, 
and when, in spite of them, it escapes, they try to 
imitate it artificially. And the result is woeful, 
because they have no true ideal. I believe that 
any one who teaches us to see and feel real beauty 
in our youth is a benefactor to the world. 

On the physical basis alone some women lec- 
turers on beauty seem to have solved the question 
of retaining it far more successfully than Major 
Pendennis. They have an ideal of a really beauti- 
ful body, while the poor major's mind was in that 
outer darkness of recreating beauty by fashion. 
They believe, at any rate, that the Beautiful has 
its foundation in the True. For example, they 
would teach you how to keep your own hair 
healthy and abundant while Major Pendennis 
would buy the most expensive of wigs. 

But I cannot prescribe lotions or even gymnas- 
tics. Far less would I, if I could, prescribe the 
medical elixir vitae by which Professor Metchni- 
koff of the Pasteur Institute proposes to delay old 



78 OLD PEOPLE 

age. I can, however, tell you of some old ladies 
whose beauty is suggestive. I called not long ago 
on one who is past ninety, and who is said to have 
been a famous beauty in her youth, and I thought 
she could have hardly looked more beautiful at 
sixteen than now, though not a vestige of the look 
of youth remains. Her skin was wrinkled and 
yellow, yet it was as soft in color as old ivory, and 
the few loose curls that escaped from her fine black 
lace head-dress were snowy white, her large dark 
eyes were full of a tenderness rarely seen in the 
young, and there was an expression of sweetness 
about the gentle curves of the mouth that belongs 
only to those who have known years of love and 
suffering. Though her form was bent, there was 
a dignity in her bearing beyond the reach of any 
young beauty. Her dress was lovely, too, — a soft 
gray India silk, set off with rich old lace ; it made 
a fitting frame for the picture. 

Though you might say of her that she must 
have been beautiful in her youth, it is not because 
of the remains of that beauty that you would call 
her beautiful now. Her beauty now is a real thing, 
as distinctive, belonging as truly to her, as the 



OUTWARD BEAUTY 79 

beauty of her youth. The soft blue and silver and 
rose in a November sunset are not like the glory 
of midsummer ; that low-toned, unobtrusive love- 
liness is entirely its own. And so it is with this 
old lady. Her beauty in youth was given to her. 
She has won the beauty of age by her beauty of 
life. 

I have spoken of the fitness of her dress. Not 
all who wear soft silks and rich laces know how 
to wear them, and not all can wear them at all. 
But I have seen another old lady in the simplest 
dress who was beautiful, too. She also had been a 
beauty in youth, but her life had not been passed, 
like that of the other, in the society of Washing- 
ton and New York and Saratoga. She was a Quak- 
eress of Nantucket who had hardly left the island 
from childhood to old age, and she was poor. She 
lived in a plain, bare room, and had to attend to 
her own small housekeeping. But her eyes had 
not lost brightness and directness of gaze, and she 
held her tall figure erect as old people seldom do 
— as perhaps they never do unless they have done 
their duty steadily and firmly and calmly all their 
lives. And her dress was as fitting as that of the 



80 OLD PEOPLE 

other. It was of plain brown woolen, and made 
as simply as it is possible to make a dress. I saw 
her in the morning when she was busy with her 
housework. Perhaps on other occasions her dress 
might have been relieved by the sheer white lace 
that the Friends rightly approve ; but now she had 
not even a band about her neck, the binding of 
her brown robe coming up high enough to cover 
the painful wrinkles that make us all so ugly as 
we grow old. But she needed nothing to set off 
the noble face and figure, and the plain dress 
suggested only the " seamless robe." I will not say 
that all old ladies could be beautiful. I do not 
suppose so. But it is not dress that makes beauty, 
even in old age, though a tawdry dress may ruin 
it, and dignity and propriety of dress make it pos- 
sible that beauty should be revealed. With this 
woman, as with my other friend, the beauty of 
her age was something distinct, a genuine posses- 
sion that she had won from living nobly. 

Since the peculiar beauty of age is so largely 
an achievement, it is not strange that sometimes 
a face that has seemed hopelessly plain in middle 
life becomes illuminated when surrounded by a 



OUTWARD BEAUTY 81, 

halo of white hair. And yet, of course, there are 
features so grotesquely ugly that it is hard in- 
deed for the spirit to shine through. I think 
young people are often repelled by the manifest 
ugliness when older people, who have learned to 
look deeper, see it transfigured by the soul within, 
even when it has not burst the physical bonds. 
But even children are sometimes moved by it un- 
consciously. I remember seeing for a few mo- 
ments in my childhood a great-aunt, a little wisp 
of an old lady, who struck me as hopelessly ugly. 
" Yes," said my mother, " I suppose she is so ; but 
when I was a child, I thought she was beautiful, 
because she was always doing something to make 
me happy." Perhaps it might have been the same 
with me if I had had an opportunity to see my 
great-aunt often. At any rate, her ugliness would 
have been forgotten in her goodness ; but I think 
my mother meant more than that, — that the face 
was actually pleasing to her. 

One of the most beautiful old faces I ever 
knew was that of the mother of a large family 
who had spent her life in hard work for her chil- 
dren and grandchildren, and who continued to 



82 OLD PEOPLE 

work for them placidly and swiftly with her skill- 
ful needle till she reached fourscore. A daguerre- 
otype of her in middle life shows an exquisite, 
delicate face, full of sweetness and brightness. 
You would be sure that the original of that da- 
guerreotype would lead a life of unselfish, loving 
activity ; and yet in her age there was a benignant 
beauty not earlier seen, a beauty that had come 
from fulfilling the early promise. The biologists 
show us that every line in our bodies is the result 
of the past activity of either ourselves or our an- 
cestors, and the lines that are added to the face 
in a single life from youth to age, when they are 
lines of constant love, must give it a higher beauty 
than the unlined face can possibly wear, though 
perhaps to see it we need the " anointed eye." 



VIII 

DARKNESS 

In youth, we all say we should not wish to live if 
we should have the misfortune to lose a sense, 
and I have often noticed in young people a cer- 
tain air of having spoken virtuously in saying 
this, as if they stood on a higher plane than the 
old people they know who live on in spite of their 
deprivation. When the actual test conies to the 
old, and the loss is felt instead of being imagined, 
the pain at first is so great that the sufferer longs 
for death as a release ; but he has no such proud 
consciousness of virtue. He certainly does not 
wish to live any more than he supposed he should 
when he was a youth ; but the choice to live or die 
is not given him. The mental suffering reacts on 
the body, and sometimes the nervous exhaustion 
that follows incapacitates him for doing anything 
to alleviate his affliction. In most cases, however, 
the state of moral, and therefore also of mental 
and physical prostration is a transient one. The 



84 OLD PEOPLE 

courageous and unselfish recognize the truth of 
what perhaps has been only a trite saying to them 
before, that it is life that calls for courage and not 
death ; and they summon all their powers to make 
the best of life both for themselves and for others. 
But to all sufferers, however weak, time brings 
some alleviation, because they learn to adapt 
themselves to new circumstances. The blind, for 
example, learn to judge so much by the ear and 
the touch that they are less confused and fright- 
ened in the darkness than at first. Sometimes life 
again becomes dear ; perhaps it is always so when 
the sufferer is surrounded by love. 

There is no time when the tenderness and 
thoughtfulness and forbearance of friends are so 
much needed as when it first becomes evident that 
one is suffering from a disease which, it is be- 
lieved, will end in the loss of a sense. The patient 
is so overwhelmed by finding the unexpected ca- 
lamity close upon him, and is reminded of it so 
constantly by the necessity of readjusting himself 
every moment to his environment, that he hardly 
has the presence of mind to call his highest pow- 
ers to his assistance. He distrusts and fears his 



DARKNESS 85 

dearest friends, to whom he is acutely aware he is 
becoming a burden. If those who love him, love 
him enough to make him feel their love, he may 
be saved from wreck ; but it is a time of crisis. 

I knew an old gentleman, the cheeriest of men, 
who, when he discovered that the darkness he had 
supposed to be temporary was to be permanent, 
lifted up his voice and wept aloud. In his case 
the blindness was the result of disease that had 
already paralyzed him. Before we say he was not 
courageous, let us think what it was for him to 
be bedridden, and then to learn that he was never 
more to see his wife's sweet face, or the chang- 
ing foliage of the trees outside his windows. And 
yet his pain was alleviated. His wife was one of 
those angelic women who seem born to minister to 
others, and she found ways to brighten even his 
sombre life. His good and affectionate son thought 
of a thousand costly services that could contribute 
to his father's happiness. Some one was always at 
hand to read to the invalid, who had a passion for 
books. His person and his room were kept with 
the exquisite neatness that he loved and felt, 
though he could not see it. He had been an 



86 OLD PEOPLE 

enthusiastic horticulturist ; and now his room was 
always fragrant with roses or violets or mignon- 
ette. His friends came to visit him, and if he 
shrank from letting them see the wreck he had 
become, yet he rallied all his forces and spoke his 
slow, broken words of greeting with the dignity 
of his best days. His friends loved him, and they 
made him feel their love. 

I knew another blind old man whose life was 
made full and happy by the devotion of his wife. 
She was not rich enough to give him the luxuries 
she would have liked to lavish upon him, but she 
gave him without stint of her own life. Though 
she could not afford a servant, and had to receive 
a boarder into the house to make the ends meet, 
she was always ready to answer the call of her 
blind husband. She waited on him from morning 
till night with untiring patience. She read aloud 
to him the dullest parts of the newspapers by the 
hour together ; and as he grew deaf, too, she sat 
nearer and nearer to him, and raised her sweet 
voice to a louder and louder tone. He never knew 
all she did for him. He could not see what the 
lookers-on could see; but he loved her dearly. 



DARKNESS 87 

How could she do all she did? She was an old 
lady with white hair and a furrowed face. How 
was it that her strength did not fail ? Perhaps the 
time has not yet come when the mind can wholly 
master the body, and there must be many loving 
women who would have fallen as they stood in 
such a battle as hers ; but this I am sure of, — it 
was love that made the victory possible for her. 
Her life was a rich one in spite of its cares, richer 
probably than if her husband's misfortune had not 
called upon her for such constant effort. And her 
husband's life was rich. He, too, had the spirit of 
helpfulness. He did all he could, and it was really 
surprising to see what he succeeded in doing. He 
even cultivated a vegetable garden with success, 
and trimmed his own grapevines. He was of 
use, and the thought made him cheerful. He 
was able to take an active part in church work, 
and filled an important place in the community. 
The newspapers his wife read so indefatigably to 
him gave him material to ponder upon. There was 
no more conscientious voter than he, and every 
conscientious voter is always needed. 

Not long ago I met, at a field meeting of a 



88 OLD PEOPLE 

Natural History Club, an old gentleman who had 
been all his life one of the most active members 
of the club, but who had now become blind and 
had to depend on some friend to lead him about. 
It was not sad to see him because of the radiance 
of his smile. " I don't know/' he said sweetly, 
" but I am as happy as I was before I was blind." 
And he really looked so, as he sat in the shade of 
the trees, and breathed the fragrance of sweet fern 
and bayberry, and felt the breeze stirring his 
beautiful white hair, and chatted with the hosts 
of friends who enjoyed his presence. And that 
assurance added to the happiness of everybody 
else. Yet it was a startling declaration, and one 
would have liked to know his secret. A man 
eighty-eight years old and blind, a man, too, 
whose wife had passed on before him, and who had 
no children to cherish him, — how could he be so 
happy ? " The kingdom of heaven is within you." 
Sometimes we suddenly realize that this is no mere 
form of words. I asked him what he could do to 
pass away the time. "I learn poetry," he said, 
and he further mentioned what seemed an aston- 
ishing fact, that he learned more and more quickly 



DARKNESS 89 

as time went on. We are in the habit of thinking 
that only the young can learn verbatim; but he 
said that in his youth he had been too busy with 
necessary work to learn poetry, and now, with 
leisure, he seemed to be able to open a new and 
rich vein of life. His nerves were apparently un- 
worn, and his blood still flowed easily through 
his brain, though perhaps more gently than of 
old. When I asked what he was learning just 
then, I was somewhat surprised at his replying, 
" The long scene between Iago and Cassio in 
Othello" I should not have thought of that scene 
as one calculated to produce his heavenly frame of 
mind 5 but he explained that his reason for choosing 
it was that he thought he could interest the mem- 
bers of the Grange to which he belonged by 
reciting it to them. " At our meetings," he said, 
" the members take turns in furnishing some en- 
tertainment, and of course I want to take my turn 
with the rest." As we had a leisure half hour, 
and it was pleasant sitting under the trees, I asked 
him if he would recite the scene to me, which he 
willingly did. He repeated it with the utmost 
simplicity, without the least attempt at elocution- 



90 OLD PEOPLE 

ary display, but in a musical voice and with great 
spirit and appreciation, pausing, from time to time, 
to remark on the various readings of certain pas- 
sages and to suggest the meaning of doubtful 
words. When I asked how it had been possible 
for him to learn the scene, he said his housekeeper 
read the passages aloud to him as he needed them. 

Other blind persons have trained themselves to 
other occupations. Most blind women knit and 
crochet beautifully and make a thousand pretty 
and useful things for their friends. Some succeed 
in learning to sew. I know a lovely woman whose 
eyes were so weak in her youth that she had to 
resort to all kinds of work to keep her active 
spirit from chafing ; and now, in her later years, 
she never sees a blind person sitting idle without 
beginning at once to teach some of her accom- 
plishments. 

I know a resolute, unselfish woman who at the 
very threshold of age has lost her sight, though 
she has heroically endured one surgical operation 
after another in the hope of saving it. To be 
helpless seemed to her worse than death. To call 
on others for a hundred little personal services 



DARKNESS 91 

seemed intolerable to her. It has been her life- 
long habit to help, not to receive help. Now she 
must ask service — from those who love her, it 
is true, and who are glad to give it, but who, as she 
well knows, have their days already filled to the 
brim with other necessary work. At first, the trial 
prostrated her, but her friends did not understand 
its real bitterness, — no one, it appears, however 
sympathetic, can understand what it means to lose 
a sense, except by actually losing it, — until one 
day her mother said with satisfaction, about some 
new arrangement that had been made in the 
family, "And now Mary will never have to be 
alone." At this the good-tempered, self-controlled 
Mary burst out tempestuously, " I shall never 
have to be alone ! Don't you see that what is kill- 
ing me is that I never can be alone? " Then her 
friends began to realize that blindness was not 
just what they had thought it to be. Mary has 
rallied. Of course such a woman would rally. She 
has learned a thousand new accomplishments, 
type-writing among the rest, and she does her 
work beautifully. She is now of the greatest use 
to those who are called upon to be useful to her. 



92 OLD PEOPLE 

It is a blessing to look upon the cheerful peace 
of her face. It is not necessary that she should 
toil or spin, since she does good simply by living ; 
yet, I suppose, if she had not toiled till she had 
won the accomplishments which make her practi- 
cally useful, that cheerful peace might never 
have shone upon her face. 

Some blind persons seem to have extraordinary 
powers denied to those who see. It is said, for in- 
stance, that Sir John Fielding, the half-brother 
of the great novelist, an energetic magistrate in 
London, knew three thousand thieves by their 
voices alone. But, as a general thing, great special 
powers are not developed in those who become 
blind late in life. 

Happily not many people are called upon to 
bear the inexpressibly heavy burden of actual 
blindness ; but not one person in ten thousand 
lives to be old without losing a part of his power 
of vision. When the eyes begin to fail even a 
little, I suppose the stoutest-hearted of us draws 
a long breath, and realizes soberly that life hence- 
forth is not going to be exactly what it has been. 
When, however, the failure is normal and grad- 



DARKNESS 93 

ual, when one at fifty wears only the weakest 
glasses, and at eighty can still recognize a friend 
across the street, the change in the eyes does not 
seem to be felt as a serious misfortune. Glasses 
are an inconvenience at first, but one soon be- 
comes accustomed to them, and forgets that he 
does not see as well as ever. But when the fail- 
ure in vision is rapid so that one has hardly 
learned to use one pair of glasses before he needs 
a pair of higher power, or when the ability to ad- 
just the eyes to different distances is so feeble 
that it is necessary to use distance glasses as well 
as reading glasses, then there is constant irritation 
from the effort to accommodate one's self to the 
varying distance of objects. " You object to two 
pairs of glasses?" remarked a physician to one 
who complained of this difficulty. "You may 
think yourself fortunate not to be obliged to use 
three." But even three pairs would not make vi- 
sion easy. The trouble in such cases is usually in 
the general weakness of the system, and the ocu- 
list who proposes to supply one with a whole case 
of glasses makes the matter worse. Sometimes the 
general physician can help; but the best help 



94 OLD PEOPLE 

comes from rest, fresh air, exercise, and cheer- 
ful, courageous thoughts. Unfortunately the 
failure of the eyes is likely to occur when we are 
in the very thickest of the battle of life. Rest 
seems impossible, fresh air out of reach, and the 
daily drudgery leaves no time for rational exer- 
cise. Moreover, as the cares of this world are 
usually most pressing at the beginning of old age, 
when we must provide both for the generation 
passing off the stage and for that just coming 
upon it, our anxieties make cheerful thoughts dif- 
ficult, especially when our eyes will not allow us 
to take refuge in books. I once heard a lady who 
had suffered far more than is the common lot in 
many ways say, " The greatest suffering of my 
life has come from my eyes. When I could use 
them even half an hour a day and fortify myself 
by reading something noble, I felt able to meet 
all my other troubles." 

And yet life is deeper than books. The supreme 
help comes from within, not from without. But no 
one can speak dogmatically about this. And no 
one who has not been tried to the very uttermost 
can expect his testimony to be accepted by any 



DARKNESS 95 

other sufferer. It certainly does sometimes seem 
as if the supreme help can only reach us through 
outward channels, and therefore, before we exhort 
others to courage and cheerfulness, suppose we 
see what we can do to add to their resources our- 
selves. 

I know a lady of sixty whose eyes have failed 
so far that her only chance of avoiding blindness 
is to give up any attempt either to read or to sew. 
" But Ellen is eyes for me," she says, gratefully 
turning to her cheerful, ungrudging old friend 
and companion. 

Even Helen Keller, who is probably more nobly 
independent of her senses than any other human 
being, tells us in her matchless autobiography that 
she must have remained a wild, rebellious little 
animal but for the devotion of her wonderful 
teacher, Miss Sullivan. Fortunately, the hardest 
heart is touched by blindness. Nobody ever laughs 
at the blind. While no novelist can resist the 
temptation to make his deaf characters ridiculous, 
yet he spares the blind. A friend points out that 
the blind old Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice 
is made ridiculous by his son, but that is the only 



96 OLD PEOPLE 

instance I remember in fiction. Dickens makes 
the blind man in Barnaby Rudge hideous in his 
wickedness, and our very blood runs cold at the 
thought of the blind man of Stevenson's Trea- 
sure Island; but neither character is to be laughed 
at, and though each is made more frightful by his 
calamity, it is not the calamity from which we 
shrink. It is because the pathos of blindness moves 
us to sympathize with all our hearts, that we are 
so repelled when it is accompanied by unmitigated 
wickedness. We cannot bear not to sympathize. 
The blind do receive pity, but they need more 
than that. They need warm, active love that is not 
afraid to spend and be spent in helping them not 
simply to bear their misfortune, but to live a full 
life, such a life as Miss Sullivan has made possible 
for Helen Keller. 

And how can the blind themselves meet their 
misfortune? Helen Keller has shown us how. But 
she is young and strong and endowed with genius, 
some old person will say despondingly, feeling 
that she cannot be a guide for one who is feeble 
and dull. Even misfortunes that seem alike to 
lookers-on are not alike, because of differing tern- 



DARKNESS 97 

peraments and circumstances. " Every affliction 
stands alone/' says a friend. Who can dare to lay 
down the law for other people? But not long 
ago, I heard a brave lady, who, in her protracted 
life, has been thoroughly tested, say this of her 
way of bearing the loss of a sense, " Every mis- 
fortune that presses upon us always, without any 
moments of respite, is a blessing. It seems to call 
constantly, ' Up ! up ! ' It is impossible to live at 
all on a low plane. We must rise into the clear 
air. And the strength we gain from conquering 
in this constant battle helps us in every other. It 
is as if we became invincible." 



IX 

SILENCE 

Deafness is not, of course, confined to the old : 
yet it is one of the chief infirmities of age. It is 
more noticeable probably than most other signs 
of advancing years, because, even in its earliest 
stages, it lays a burden on other people. Though 
the failure of the eyes is in reality a much more 
grievous trial to the sufferer than the failure of 
the ears, it makes little difference to other people 
till it reaches actual blindness, and that condition 
is as rare as total deafness. 

One can lose about half the power of hear- 
ing without being greatly incommoded, except by 
the fatigue, which often brings on nervous pros- 
tration ; but beyond that point, the difficulties in- 
crease, not only to the sufferer himself, but to all 
his friends, and to even the most casual of his ac- 
quaintances. The moment it becomes impossible 
for one to hear ordinary conversation, that moment 
all one's friends begin to be conscious of one's 



SILENCE 99 

misfortune. It is for this reason that the loss of 
hearing seems to tend more to morbid conditions 
than the loss of any other power. Brooding over 
other losses may be prevented, in a measure at 
least, by resolutely mingling with other people ; 
but the only possibility of forgetting one's deaf- 
ness lies in avoiding other people altogether. It is 
not alone the strain of listening that makes social 
life so depressing to the deaf, though that in it- 
self is sufficient to dull the charm of all conversa- 
tion ; it is the fact that every one who speaks to a 
deaf person is also called upon to make an effort, 
and that this also takes away from the natural 
ease of conversation. Beyond all is the conscious- 
ness of the listener that others are making an 
effort in his behalf. All these circumstances serve 
to concentrate the mind on the misfortune one 
wishes to ignore, and unless the subject of con- 
versation is a peculiarly absorbing one, the game 
does not seem to be worth the candle. 

Deafness separates a man from his friends, 
even from his acquaintances, and from all at 
once. The closer the friend, the more absolute the 
separation in some respects. A friend does not 



100 OLD PEOPLE 

mind saying," It is a fine day," in a loud, cheerful 
voice, but when he has some delicate experience to 
confide, the voice falls involuntarily ; and who, re- 
ceiving a confidence, would like to ask, " Did you 
say that she was dying, or that she was whining " ? 
And so the listener keeps still, and tries to guess 
at the right word, and guesses wrong, and makes 
the wrong response. How many of the finer tones 
of friendship are lost to the deaf? For no one will 
tell his inmost feelings with a shout. He cannot do 
it, if he would. And who can ask to have a tender 
whisper repeated by Stentor ? 

Deafness actually separates us from children. 
It is true the children in a family will learn to 
accommodate themselves to a deaf member of it, 
but without training a child does not know how 
to adapt his voice to the deaf. The deaf may 
talk to children, but they cannot have the refresh- 
ment of hearing their unthinking prattle. "I am 
deaf," said a lady to a delightful little fellow who 
was sending the rest of the family into peals of 
laughter by his quaint sayings. " Won't you try 
to speak loud enough forme to hear?" The child 
nodded, and bracing himself firmly, sent forth 



SILENCE 101 

a roar sufficient to waken the Seven Sleepers. 
" There, did you hear that?" he asked, compla- 
cently. The poor lady laughed, and made no 
further attempt to join in the fun. 

All moralists teach us that isolation is the source 
both of sorrow and of sin. Willful isolation is 
selfishness. In Dante's lowest circle of Purgatory, 
the sufferers see beautiful ideals sculptured in the 
rocks ; but it is not till they have toiled up to the 
next cornice that they are able to hear inspiring 
songs, and the interpreters tell us that the pride 
which shuts our ears to the voices of other souls is 
the deadliest because the most selfish of sins. 

But the deaf are forced to isolation. The task 
is set them to cast off selfishness without the help 
that comes naturally and unconsciously from the 
mere every-day intercourse with others. Is it not a 
hard task ? Well, we all have our own special tasks. 
Every man must bear his own burden. But then, 
we must bear one another's burdens too. 

After all, it is hardly worth while to dwell on the 
suffering that inevitably accompanies deafness ; it 
is better to see how it may be borne, and how we 
may all help those afflicted to bear their burden. 



102 OLD PEOPLE 

I have known a woman who bore her contin- 
ually increasing deafness with equanimity till her 
hearing was about half gone; and then just at the 
moment when she became a physical burden to her 
friends because they had to make an effort to talk 
with her, she doubled their burden by apparently 
losing her temper over her misfortune. I think of 
no other word so suitable as " cantankerous " to 
describe the front she then presented to the world. 
I had never thought her a very courageous indi- 
vidual ; but in youth she had had a lively and agree- 
able manner, and I did expect her to behave 
better in her old age. It must be said in excuse 
for her that she was suffering from nervous pros- 
tration, brought on by overwork and anxiety 
from which no escape seemed possible, and her 
eyes had failed, too, in the general catastrophe. 
After a time some mitigation of her outward cir- 
cumstances gave her a little rallying power when 
her attitude decidedly changed. " I always thought 
I should like to try somebody else's sensorium, ,, 
she said. " You and I both agree, for instance, 
that the rose is red, and that the Fifth Symphony 
is magnificent. But how do I know that your red 



SILENCE 103 

is like my red, or that your chords sound like my 
chords ? And how do you suppose the world looks 
to a bird — or a bear ? I always thought it would 
be fun to try all sorts of sensoria, and that perhaps 
that might be one of the recreations in another 
life. And now, behold, my own sensorium is com- 
pletely changed, and I am introduced unexpectedly 
to all the fun. The whole world has become a 
vast pantomime for my special benefit. The chil- 
dren's Christmas extravaganza is nothing in com- 
parison." Such " fun " as she enjoyed could hardly 
be permanent, though it might be agreeable for a 
little while ; but I have observed that the more 
courageous among both the deaf and the blind do 
find a great deal of solid interest in life in seeing 
how much they can make out of their altered cir- 
cumstances. There is a real zest in trying to do an 
old thing in a new way. So, paradoxically, every 
limitation increases our breadth of experience. 

I have known a deaf woman who bore her mis- 
fortune perfectly. It fell upon her when she was 
a beautiful, ardent girl, full of life and activity, 
and she lived to be old. Her first years were years 



104 OLD PEOPLE 

of anguish of which she never spoke at the time ; 
nor did she speak of them later when the anguish 
had changed to peace, except as she hoped to help 
others who were passing through the same valley 
of suffering. Debarred from ordinary conversation, 
able to hear only by the aid of a trumpet, and 
exhausted by the fatigue attending the attempt 
to hear, so that though she was endowed by na- 
ture with a strong body, she was a semi-invalid 
all her life, she yet gathered about her a large 
circle of warm friends who felt that a conversation 
with her was so noble and uplifting that its dif- 
ficulties were not to be counted. To many, one 
of these conversations was the beginning of a 
new epoch in life. From the world at large, my 
friend was necessarily somewhat separated. She 
counted it a compensation to be excused from formal 
calls and other conventionalities, and a blessing 
that she could not hear gossip or trivial chat. 
And yet she was not without a benign influence 
on mere acquaintances. The serenity in her clear 
blue eyes, the graciousness and thoughtfulness in 
her manner were felt by every one who came in 
contract with her, however casually. The springs 



SILENCE 105 

of her inner life were pure, and that was the se- 
cret of the perfect outward expression. She was 
a woman of intellect. Her original studies in bot- 
any gave her a standing among scientific men ; 
her studies in literature, economics, sociology, and 
philosophy so developed her judgment that she 
had something of value to offer to the wisest, and 
through her immense correspondence she influ- 
enced hundreds of lives. Now the union of in- 
tellect and character is a mystery. Had my friend's 
intellect been less strong, she could not have 
filled the same place in the world ; and yet in- 
tellect is not character. Such a character as hers, 
even with the humblest mental endowment, must 
bear beautiful fruit ; but it would be very differ- 
ent fruit from that which it was her privilege to 
bring to perfection. Cut off as she was from 
outward sources of stimulus, if her inward life 
had been less active, it would seem as if there 
must have been a certain depletion of spiritual 
force. As it was, she said that the compensation 
for her loss was a great inward peace. She said 
she felt that she could not have endured the stress 
of a richer life than she already had. To a friend, 



106 OLD PEOPLE 

upon whom the silence fell late in life, and who 
found it almost impossible to adjust herself to it, 
she said, " I wish you could look at your deafness 
as I do at mine, as a blessing." " I never shall," 
was the reply. " The most I can hope for is to 
be reconciled to it as a part of the discipline my 
Father sees I need." " But you never will be even 
reconciled to it," she answered sweetly, " unless 
you aim higher than that." To this woman deaf- 
ness was a blessing because it had shown her the 
heights of life. 

Helen Keller, far more heavily burdened still, 
seems to stand on the same heights, and to be glad 
of the unique work given her to do. Such women 
raise the standard of life for all others. Their at- 
titude towards misfortune is certainly the right 
one. 

Edison is reported to be glad he is deaf because 
he is thus saved from interruption. No doubt when 
a man is absorbed in a great work, such as nobody 
else is capable of doing, his whole heart is filled, 
and hearing would be a superfluous — even an an- 
noying — sense. But not all have genius. Most 
battles have to be fought on a lower level. 



SILENCE 107 

My friend had, besides her rich intellectual en- 
dowment, two great sources of help in her life. 
In the first place, she did not have to earn her liv- 
ing, so that she never felt the pain and anxiety of 
having to take part, heavily handicapped, in the 
struggle for life. For a smaller nature, the neces- 
sity of earning a livelihood, painful as it is, is an 
almost indispensable stimulus to the higher life. It 
absolutely forbids the giving way to morbid sen- 
sitiveness so characteristic of the deaf. It forces 
one who would fain shrink into a hermitage into 
contact with other people. He cannot draw back 
and say, " I will not lay on other people the bur- 
den of speaking to me," not only because he would 
then starve, — which, in his more morbid moments, 
he would be quite ready to do, — but because, be- 
fore he succeeded in starving, he would certainly 
become a much heavier burden to other people 
than, by reason of his deafness, he already is. But 
my friend's nature was so large that she did not 
need this stimulus, and was thereby saved some 
very poignant suffering. Moreover, she was singu- 
larly blest in her friends. " Ah, no," she said, "it 
has never in my life been necessary for me to feel 



108 OLD PEOPLE 

that I was a burden to my friends." I suppose that 
not one deaf person in ten thousand could say that. 
Her friends must have been a hierarchy of the no- 
blest souls if none of them had ever shown impa- 
tience with her misfortune. Every deaf person has 
some friends as true as steel who lighten the afflic- 
tion by their way of helping to bear it ; but it is 
a rare case where there is not one at least among 
the nearest and dearest who does not feel it an un- 
endurable bore to raise the voice or to sit in the 
position necessary in talking with the deaf. And 
when one trusted friend has shown this impatience, 
the germ of suspicion takes possession of the af- 
flicted person, and he believes that he is a burden 
to everybody. Of course he is wrong. There are 
many among his friends who do not find it particu- 
larly unpleasant to sit near him and speak in a loud 
voice ; but then he is never quite sure who these 
are. The friends of the deaf in general are called 
upon to bear a burden, and the deaf man knows 
it. He must try to lighten the burden ; and with 
most deaf people the only way that occurs to them 
to do this is to avoid conversation altogether. It 
is a rare thing for a deaf person to betake himself 



SILENCE 109 

to a trumpet — always conspicuous and inconven- 
ient — till he is urged to do so by some one else. 
To most deaf people, a trumpet seems to seal their 
fate. " Leave all hope ye who enter here." The 
deaf try to believe that they are only a little hard 
of hearing, and that perhaps a change in the 
weather, or an improvement in their general health 
may give them back a part, at least, of their birth- 
right ; and then some friend, who is thought to 
have tact, gently insinuates that they would be 
happier with a trumpet ! I have seen a sweet old 
lady, whose hearing was only very slightly impaired, 
flush painfully when her daughter, whose soft voice 
made it particularly hard for her to make herself 
understood, simply asked her if she did not want 
to try the trumpet of a deaf caller. The old lady 
well knew how much less her infirmity was than 
that of the caller, but she saw that her daughter 
was classifying them together, and she knew that 
the daughter was tired of raising her voice. 

Many of my deaf friends use trumpets ; but I 
have known only one who purchased a trumpet of 
her own accord, and she did not adopt the instru- 
ment till after so many years of increasing deaf- 



110 OLD PEOPLE 

ness that the burden of it seemed less to her than 
the fatigua of doing without it. The help a trum- 
pet gives, certainly at first, is hardly more than a 
reminder of one's loss. I have been told of a 
mother who had never heard her children's voices 
except through a trumpet. She held her trumpet 
to hear her baby coo. But how much like a baby's 
cooing was that exaggerated blare ? When any- 
body says to me, " Mrs. Blank is rejoicing in her 
new ear-trumpet," I know very well that when I 
next call on the Blanks, Mr. Blank and Miss 
Blank will tell me how delightful Mrs. Blank's new 
trumpet is, and that Mrs. Blank will sit silently 
by with a heightened color. She will not dispel 
the illusion of her husband and daughter, because 
she knows she ought to lighten the burden of her 
deafness to them as much as she can. And in time 
she gets accustomed to her new possession, and 
really finds it useful, indeed necessary. It is certain 
that trumpets must be used by the deaf when their 
infirmity reaches an advanced stage, — for not one 
person in a thousand is willing to take the trouble 
to write on the tablets of anybody who can be 
made to understand in any other way, — but I 



SILENCE 111 

should not like to be the first to propose a trum- 
pet to a friend I loved. Aurists delay suggesting 
one till long after the acquaintances of the deaf 
have urged its use. "Do you think/' said a lady 
sadly to her aurist, " that I ought to get a trum- 
pet ? " " Not for a long time to come/' was the 
reply. " It will hurt you instead of helping you." 
"But/' she said timidly, "ought I not to use it to 
save my friends?" "Not yet/' he said. "Your 
friends must help you to bear your misfortune." 
Your friends must help you ! There is the sting. 
This is, I believe, the source of the peculiar sensi- 
tiveness of the deaf, always so puzzling to those of 
us who can hear. 

I have seen a lovely woman so thoughtful of 
her deaf old uncle that she sat always close by his 
side and directed her conversation with every- 
body in the room entirely to his ear. In that way, 
she almost brought him into the family circle. 
Yet the time came when her voice failed. All her 
love and sympathy could not make it possible for 
her to talk to him. Then, with affectionate care, 
she selected the best trumpet she could find, and 
made him a present of it. This was the first hint 



112 OLD PEOPLE 

the poor old gentleman had had of the sacrifice 
she was making for him, and he returned the gift 
without a word. " He will not even try to help 
us/' said his disappointed niece. Was he selfish? 
He was probably so absorbed in the difficulty of 
hearing even when his niece did her best, that he 
was totally oblivious to the effort she was making. 
If he could have understood it, he must have be- 
come acutely sensitive. He certainly felt that it 
would be easier to withdraw into himself than to 
be burdened with a trumpet, and he must have 
known that no trumpet would altogether relieve 
her strain. He probably felt that the best thing 
for everybody would be for him to relinquish all 
conversation. That would lift the burden from 
others altogether. Yet we are to bear our burdens, 
not to shirk them, and we are to bear one an- 
other's burdens. No doubt the spiritual life of the 
whole family is richer when the sufferer allows his 
friends to bear the part of the burden they are 
really able to sustain, and helps them to the very 
utmost of his own power, with instruments, if it 
must be. 

The young can learn lip-reading, and lift their 



SILENCE 113 

burden almost entirely from the shoulders of 
others ; but after the eyes begin to fail, this is too 
great a nervous strain for most constitutions, and 
the old can hardly hope to conquer the difficult 
art. 

The method of adaptation to any misfortune 
must vary with the character of each individual. 
Edison is thankful for an excuse to escape ordi- 
nary conversation ; but I knew a beautiful old 
lady whose keenest suffering in her deafness came 
from not being able to join in the ordinary dis- 
course of her family and friends. She was a 
bright, sociable, sweet-natured woman, interested 
in all the people about her. Then came the silence, 
and it seemed to her that her whole life stood 
still. The Eddas tell us that "the deaf can still 
fight and be useful." She could not fight, and she 
could no longer be useful in her old way. She was 
certainly very useful still, for she was an excellent 
housekeeper and seamstress, and she could cook 
delicious food. Many a poor overworked mother 
found her burden suddenly lifted when her deaf 
neighbor came in for a moment and insisted on 
carrying away an armful of sewing to finish, and 



114 OLD PEOPLE 

many an invalid found an appetite when some 
of the dainty dishes my friend had made were 
brought to the bedside. But in the past it had 
been her habit to chat pleasantly with the neigh- 
bors she helped, and she had modestly fancied 
that they valued her words as much as her deeds. 
It is true she was not now dumb ; but to chat is 
not to lecture, and a woman like this one cannot 
say much unless she has a response. 

She had loved to give little tea-parties, and 
these parties had been looked upon as unusually 
delightful, because she had such a charming way 
of bringing all her guests into touch with one 
another, by a word here, and a smile there, by 
capping the anecdote of one, and suggesting that 
another should tell her own pet story apropos of 
some remark just made. Now a change came over 
these little tea-parties. The china and rolls were 
as before, the visitors did their best and she did 
her best, but the charm had vanished. So the par- 
ties ceased. 

She had always loved to go to church, and it 
grieved her family that she should give up going ; 
they urged her to go even if she could not hear 



SILENCE 115 

all she had once heard, and she yielded to them. 
" How glad I am you made the effort ! " said her 
sister, radiant, on their return. " Are you ? " said 
my sweet old friend. "I was conscious of only 
one sound during the whole service. I knew when 
the organ was played by the trembling of the 
floor." So, after that, she stayed at home and read 
her Bible and her hymn-book alone. 

She had always been active in the Ladies' Sew- 
ing Society, and she had entertained a houseful 
of guests at any time of a religious conference. 
She did not relax her efforts now. She was work- 
ing unselfishly for others, not for herself. But the 
spirit of the meetings was no longer what it had 
been when she could interchange thoughts with 
her visitors. Meat and raiment she could still give : 
but the life is more than meat. 

I am speaking not only from her point of view 
but from that of her guests. Most of them did 
not get the uplift from the visit they had once 
counted upon. They had not altogether understood 
before how much had been due to her. She was 
not a great talker, and she never put herself for- 
ward, but she thought sensibly and unselfishly on 



116 OLD PEOPLE 

many subjects, and the few words she contributed 
almost unnoticed to a conversation often gave it 
a higher tone. She herself thought only of her 
own loss in not hearing the wise words of her fa- 
vorite ministers ; but they discovered that the loss 
was not entirely hers. A few, however, had the 
insight to see that something was given for what 
had been taken away. The patient sweetness of 
the gentle old face was not lost on all her friends. 
Some of them felt that her life still helped them 
even more than her good words had once done. 
But you see her problem was very different from 
Edison's. I do not know whether she altogether 
won her battle, for she withdrew more and more 
into herself, till at last she seldom saw any one out- 
side her own family. Each has his own burden. 
The burdens look alike, but they are entirely 
different. 

In this case the family of my friend gathered 
about her with the tenderest love, and helped her 
efficiently to lift her burden. I wish I could paint 
the picture of the fair, quiet daughter-in-law, as 
she ministered to her husband's mother. How loud 
and clear her soft, kind voice became ! How easy 



SILENCE 117 

it always seemed for her to be close at the mother's 
side when a word of explanation was needed ! 
How careful she was to look directly towards the 
mother and speak directly to her, to see that the 
mother was placed where she had the right light 
to help her in interpreting the lips of others ! 
How affectionately the children were taught the 
same thoughtf ulness for their grandmother ! How 
they were all encouraged to show their love for 
her by caresses when their words were not under- 
stood! And this good daughter-in-law trained 
the servants patiently till they also managed to 
lighten the sufferer's burden. The generous and 
manly son of the old lady, with his deep, sonorous 
voice, could often carry on a long conversation 
with her, and he never grudged the effort. Her 
sister, though old and feeble, would exert her 
whole strength to repeat a joke in tones that could 
reach the dull ear, and would declare that it was 
no effort at all, indeed, that she liked to take the 
trouble because her own fun was doubled when 
her deaf sister joined in it. A niece, a lively young 
girl living in the family, took pains to see that 
every scrap of interesting news was straightway 



118 OLD PEOPLE 

conveyed to her aunt. In short, the whole family 
rallied about her, and at home there was still 
social life for the afflicted woman. I do not think 
one of that family circle ever dreamed of being 
heroic, and none of them is known to fame ; but 
the beauty of their unconscious, simple daily life 
brings tears to my eyes. 

It seems almost worth while to be deaf to re- 
ceive the devotion sometimes lavished on the suf- 
ferer. " I have never once felt my deafness since 
I was married," a lady said, " because my husband 
has been determined that it should not shut me 
out from anything." 

I should like to show you the way my friends, 
Winifred and Lucretia, make deafness pleasant. 
Winifred and Lucretia are hard-working women 
who live in a little apartment by themselves. In 
the same house is a deaf old lady who has some 
tastes in common with them. So, when they come 
home, after their long day's work, they coax her 
into their sitting-room. They make her lie down 
on their comfortable lounge, because they know 
by sympathetic observation something about the 
fatigue of deafness, and then they bring their 



SILENCE 119 

easy-chairs one on each side of the lounge, so that 
they, too, look comfortable, and then they begin 
to chat about things really worth while. They 
speak loudly and slowly, and the moment they see 
a puzzled look on the old lady's face they begin 
over again. And she can join in their conversation, 
though too deaf to undertake it with anybody else. 
And her face begins to glow and her eyes to shine, 
and she begins to chat herself in a natural way, 
though she has not done so before for years. She 
likes to talk with them about books, and people, 
and pictures, and even about music, which was 
once a passion with her, though she cannot now 
hear it. And she does not seem dull to them, 
though to everybody else she is a stupid old 
woman who has half lost her mind. This old lady 
was once a chatterbox. But a deaf chatterbox 
is usually a pitiable object. Even Mrs. Nickleby or 
the immortal Flora would have stopped talking 
after a while, without the stimulus of an occasional 
response. The most incorrigible chatterbox does 
not chatter in a room alone. Now this old lady 
says that she believes deafness is a needed cor- 
rective for one so talkative as she was, and that 



120 OLD PEOPLE 

she accepts it as the discipline she most requires. 
"But then/' she adds shyly to Winifred and 
Lucretia, "you can't think how delightful it is to 
have an occasional chat, for all that." 

I had occasion not long ago to watch a deaf 
old lady at dinner surrounded by a dozen young 
girls. The girls were sympathetic and well-bred, 
and they would all have been glad to relieve the 
embarrassment of the old lady, who, being forced 
to lay down her trumpet, could not join in the 
conversation. But one of the girls showed spe- 
cial skill in her treatment of the situation. She 
sat next the deaf lady, and in some mysterious 
way, apparently without any effort, she managed 
by a few words, spoken, from time to time in a 
pleasant, distinct, though not very loud voice, to 
keep her neighbor informed of most of the top- 
ics of conversation, and to make her feel that she 
was really one of the company. It is impossible 
to say how she did this. It seemed to be a work 
of unconscious genius. But I afterwards learned 
that this sweet sympathetic girl was the daughter 
of deaf parents ; and then I understood that her 
genius verified the famous definition of genius, 



SILENCE 121 

as the infinite capacity for taking pains. Young 
as she was, she had had the practice of a lifetime 
in making herself understood by the dull ears of 
those she loved, and I shall never forget the love- 
liness of her expression as she talked. 

Those who live with the deaf need special grace. 
Deafness is irritating to both the deaf person and 
his friends. We have been told how the gentle 
Laura Bridgman actually struck her mother, who 
could not endure the incessant strain of talking 
with her, though the poor girl afterwards lamented 
her loss of temper in sackcloth and ashes. To a 
very large number of persons deafness is always 
either irritating or ridiculous, or both. Story- 
writers find it a rich field for wit. Even the most 
tender-hearted novelist often makes a deaf char- 
acter absurd when he would be shocked at the 
thought of so treating one represented as blind or 
lame. Happy, then, are the deaf who have such a 
sense of humor as to be able to laugh at their own 
expense. There are some such mellow, wholesome 
natures, but their number is not very large. Most 
deaf people are anxious and suspicious, knowing 
that they do not pass for what they are worth, and 



122 OLD PEOPLE 

that their misfortune itself is of a kind to irritate 
their friends. I remember an old story in the 
Atlantic Monthly of an attempt of some old men, 
college classmates, to form a social club to talk 
over old times. They hesitated about inviting one 
member of the class. "He is so very deaf, you 
know, so unnecessarily deaf." They did not wish 
to shut him out, but they felt him to be a burden, 
and they were so irritated by being compelled to 
bear a part of his burden that they wished to think 
he was in some way to blame. 

" The dog, to gain his private ends, 
Went mad, and bit the man." 

You see, it is not without reason that the deaf 
sometimes feel that they are separated from their 
fellow creatures more completely than they could 
have believed it possible to be separated by any- 
thing but death. And yet they are wrong to allow 
such feelings to linger in their hearts, and they 
will not have met their misfortune aright till they 
feel, with my noble friend, that all such losses are 
blessings. Indeed, what spur, what lash of neces- 
sity is not a blessing ? 



SILENCE 123 

" They are calling to thee from the pinnacles of the throne 

of God ; 
I know not what hath befallen thee in this dust-heap (the 

world)," 

says Hafiz. 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 

When Troy fell, the aged queen, Hecuba, in 
bewailing her fate as captive to the Greeks, and 
enumerating all the horrors of her situation, par- 
ticularizes among them, according to Euripides, 
that of her " wrinkled back," which made it hard 
to give up the soft couch of a palace for the bed 
of a slave. Many old people escape blindness and 
deafness, but scarcely one escapes rheumatism. 
Beyond the pain it causes and the stiffness which 
makes all work unsatisfactory, it often lays one 
completely aside with lameness, and when lameness 
shuts us up in our own homes, we have more need 
than ever to begin each day with the motto " Cour- 
age and cheerfulness." If we are not actively de- 
termined to be brave and cheerful, our lives will be 
narrowed to our environment. I have just seen a 
man who for nine years has lain in bed, a pris- 
oner to one room — and he spoke in a cheerful, 
hearty voice. Think what it means to resist depres- 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 125 

sion for nine such years ! And, if you feel that the 
task is not worth the trouble to yourself , think what 
a world-wide difference it makes to other people ! 
Even when we grow old almost unconsciously 
and have no specific disability, there comes a time of 
weakness which is sometimes equally hard to bear. 
It denies us almost all pleasures, the refined and ele- 
vating as well as the mere careless physical delights 
of youth, and we begin to understand the adage 
that to the young the absence of pleasure is pain, 
and to the old the absence of pain is pleasure. No 
one has touched this theme with more insight than 
Mrs. Julia C. R. Dorr, in her fine poem, The Com- 
rades (The Soul to the Body), beginning, — 

" Comrade, art thou weary ? 
Hath the way been long ? 
Dost thou faint and falter — 
Thou who wert so strong ? " 

The soul humbly owns that " half the joy of liv- 
ing " had come from the body. 

"Think what thou hast brought me ! 
All that eye hath seen. 
Glow of dawn and sunset, 
Starlight's silver sheen. 



126 OLD PEOPLE 

All the pomp and splendor 
Of the summer day ; 
Gleam of sparkling waters 
Leaping in their play." 

And to the enumeration of the wonders of vision 
is added the " fragrance of the rose/' " the song 
of thrush and veery," and " love's most dear ca- 
resses." The poem ends courageously, — 

" Let my strength uphold thee 
As thine own strength fails, 
As the way grows steeper 
And the night prevails. 
Cheer thee, cheer thee, Comrade ! 
Drink thou of my wine — 
Lo ! the cup I bring thee 
Holds a draught divine ! " 

This is the true spirit with which to meet the de- 
cay of the body. But I know that some old people 
will say that while they could bear their weakness 
sweetly if it were only weakness, they have not 
the courage to meet it when it involves something 
far more unbearable — dependence. If the motto 
of a lifetime has been " Non ministrari sed minis- 
trare," it is hard indeed to be called upon to reverse 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 127 

it. And yet we can no longer minister, and we must 
consent to be ministered unto. And sometimes 
there is nobody to minister to us. This is a point 
on which I would not dwell ; and yet I cannot omit 
it, for I see so many old people who are left almost 
without necessary care, and this is sometimes the 
case with those who have least deserved it. Only 
those who have the strongest hold on a younger 
generation can hope to be cared for in age with 
the enthusiasm with which they themselves have 
cared for the young in the past. The childless can- 
not expect it. Even those who have children will 
find that the best of children may recognize duties 
more imperative than the care of their parents ; 
and though this cannot often be true, yet there are 
many men and women, estimable in other ways, 
who are callous to the needs of the old. They 
would be shocked to suspect themselves of grudg- 
ing food and shelter to old people, but they are 
too deeply immersed in their own affairs to give 
them the sympathy they need. 

Of course love begets love, and most of those 
who have led an active life of loving service will 
find some one ready to serve them lovingly in the 



128 OLD PEOPLE 

end ; but there are strange turns of fortune that 
may cut one off from friends. 

Here is a case in point. I know an old lady who 
was for fifty years the housekeeper and valued 
friend of one family. When, in middle age, she 
sometimes expressed anxiety about the future, the 
four young sons of the family laughed at her 
fears. As if they could not take care of her who had 
taken such care of them ! And yet she outlived 
all the sons. They had been poor men, though 
men of weight in the community, and the provi- 
sion the last one was able to make for the old 
housekeeper was very small. At seventy-five she 
could not live in a house without a furnace, and 
prepare her own meals. So she chose to exchange 
her pension for a place in an Old Ladies' Home. 
Perhaps to many, a life of independence, though 
full of physical discomforts, would have seemed 
more bearable than the life in a Home ; and yet 
perhaps she was right. In the Home, her body 
was well cared for, and she was too kind and cheer- 
ful a woman not to make friends with the old 
ladies about her. Her life is probably broader than 
it would have been if she had insisted on her in- 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 129 

dependence. She had been more than independent 
all her life, for she had been of use to others. 
Why, then, should she rebel against the Provi- 
dence that made her dependent at last? Pride is 
not a virtue. If she could still have worked, self- 
respect would have led her to do so. But though 
she was self-respecting, she was not proud. Alas, 
to most of us, pride is one of our dearest posses- 
sions. And it is so inextricably tangled with self- 
respect that though we may know in our own 
hearts which is guiding us, no one looking on can 
decide, so that we must judge others very gently. 
Dependence in old age is not a light thing, and 
we must do our very best to guard against it. But 
over-anxiety about it not only does no good, but 
it makes our lives mean. We wrong the world 
when we allow ourselves to be crushed by the bur- 
den of anxiety, for we do not give to others the 
cheer and blessing that they have a right to re- 
ceive from us. Of course there are careless crea- 
tures who never think of the future at all, and 
who feel no responsibility about providing for it, 
so that they add to the burden of the world by 
their very light-heartedness. The golden mean 



130 OLD PEOPLE 

between over-anxiety and carelessness is hard to 
find, and it never is reached except by those who 
faithfully do their very best to provide for them- 
selves and yet recognize humbly and serenely that 
it may be part of God's purpose for their lives that 
they should fail, and that if they so fail, depend- 
ence will be a blessing for which they must be 
thankful. 

This is so hard a doctrine to live up to that 
civilized countries, the world over, are beginning 
to discuss the practicability of old age pensions. 
New Zealand leads the van here as in many social 
experiments. "On October 20, 1898, the New 
Zealand House of Representatives voted to grant 
a pension of £18 per annum to persons sixty-five 
years of age and upward, of good moral character, 
who have resided in the colony twenty-five years, 
and whose income does not exceed £34." * It is 
hard to see how any harm could come from such 
a measure, especially in New Zealand where the 
taxes are so graduated that the rich pay a larger 
proportion than the poor : for the ordinary taxes 

1 Political Growth in the Nineteenth Century, by E. H. Sears, 
p. 364. 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 131 

for the support of poorhouses are largely saved, 
and the poor who thus have a modest competence 
spend their money for the necessaries of life, thus 
encouraging the best use of capital in production, 
whereas, if the taxes bore less heavily on the rich, 
their surplus would be spent in luxuries. Still, 
there is a time-honored belief that it is not right 
to rob Peter to pay Paul, even if Peter is rich and 
Paul is poor, and it will probably be a long time 
before America is persuaded to follow the plan of 
New Zealand. This generation at least will have 
ample opportunity to rise to the height of char- 
acter demanded by the present uncertainty of sup- 
port in old age. 

Nevertheless, Doctor Edward Everett Hale 
argued before a Committee of the Massachusetts 
Legislature in favor of a limited old age pension 
bill, granting to citizens of the state over sixty-five 
years old who have paid a poll tax for twenty-five 
years, and have not been convicted of any crime 
punishable by imprisonment, a pension of two dol- 
lars a week, proposing that a part of this poll tax 
should be set aside for just this purpose, and sug- 
gesting that the saving to poorhouses would offset 



132 OLD PEOPLE 

the expenditure. He said that a similar system has 
already been adopted in Belgium, Austria, Den- 
mark, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzer- 
land and Australia. So we may be nearer the 
solution of this problem at home than we have 
supposed. 

But it is not only in the matter of money 
that the old are dependent. A millionaire is as 
likely to need personal service and consideration 
from his friends as a pauper. He is perhaps 
more likely to be weak and helpless as his day 
declines. 

Weakness is in itself hard to bear, and the 
greater the vigor of the mind, the more painful 
often is the realization of the weak body that 
forces one to give up all the accustomed activities : 
though happily some old people say that their 
desire for active pleasures has vanished with the 
power to pursue them, and that there is a beauty 
and peace in the quiet life of age which must not 
be underestimated. But the weakness that involves 
dependence on others presents another phase of 
discipline. The rich can buy good service some- 
times, though not always, for it takes a fine char- 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 133 

acter to be a really good servant whatever the 
technical skill may be ; but no service that is 
bought can fill the heart or relieve the longing 
for loving companionship. When the service must 
be rendered by friends, the old feel their help- 
lessness still more poignantly. It must be owned 
that not all of the younger generation — even 
among the kind-hearted and dutiful — are ready 
to give up so much of their own interesting lives 
as is necessary for those who are to care efficiently 
for the old. They do not mean to be neglectful : 
but they have not been old themselves, and they 
do not realize just how weak their patient is, and 
how little he can do for his own comfort. And, 
furthermore, very close confinement to the care of 
the old is so deadening that one becomes the dull- 
est of companions, and it is necessary to break 
away sometimes even from no other motive than 
the happiness of the old themselves. 

Old people must remember this, and, to do them 
justice, most of them do remember it : for though 
the young have not been old, the old have been 
young, and if they have ever cared for others un- 
selfishly, they cannot forget the lessons they have 



134 OLD PEOPLE 

learned. Many old people remember these lessons 
almost too acutely. They would not deny that the 
discipline of caring for the weak has been good 
for them, and they are glad to have had it; but no 
one likes to realize that he is a means of discipline 
to others, no matter how good for the others he 
may know that discipline to be. He wishes service 
to be rendered for love and not for duty. No ser- 
vice is ever perfect to the one served till it is a 
pleasure to the one serving. But, in the very na- 
ture of things, such service is not always possible, 
even when it is wrought in love, and the old, who 
have been called upon in the past to make sacri- 
fices themselves, often sadly realize that sacrifices 
must be made for them. 

I have known one strong, cheerful woman in 
middle life who has a passion for the care of the 
weak and helpless, such an active delight in min- 
istering to them that no thought of sacrifice finds 
room in her heart. The good she does is incalcu- 
lable. The feeble, the old, the sick, the tired, lean 
on her in perfect repose, forgetting that they are 
a burden because they cannot help realizing that 
the bearing of such burdens is the very fountain 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 135 

of life to her. She is one of the rare souls of 
Wordsworth, to whom 

" Love is an unerring light, 
And joy its own interpreter." 

No one can see her without longing — and even 
trying in some small measure — to be like her, but 
most of us cannot do the things she does naturally 
without calling to our aid Duty, that " stern 
daughter of the voice of God/' and therefore our 
service is never so acceptable as hers. 

Sometimes the old brood sensitively over the 
ingratitude of those for whom they have toiled 
in the past. Now it is true that almost all of us 
forget what others have done for us in the past, 
and when the time comes for us to take our turn 
in doing, we often respond rather reluctantly, in- 
stead of rejoicing in the opportunity. And though 
most people remember the care their parents have 
given them vividly enough to wish to make a re- 
turn for it, they do not appreciate quite so fully 
what their grandparents and more distant relatives 
and friends may have done, still less what the old 



136 OLD PEOPLE 

people did in their prime for the next generation, 
without whom the third generation would have 
been helpless. Gratitude thus becomes very much 
diluted. We all have to guard ourselves against 
a grudging response to the claims of gratitude. 
But when we are old ourselves, let us remem- 
ber that what we have done in the past is 
done, and that it is not for us to remember 
it. If we have done anything in a true spirit, 
we must have done it without any thought of 
a return ; and though ingratitude is no light 
fault for the ungrateful themselves, it does no 
harm to any of us to have our best deeds forgot- 
ten. Such forgetf ulness simply calls upon us the 
more loudly for new and better deeds, even 
though they must be very different deeds from 
those we once could do. 

a He only earns his freedom and existence 
Who daily conquers them anew." 

There is a strenuous life required even of the 
feeblest. 

But what can the feeble do ? Sometimes they 
feel sadly that the only task for them is the nega- 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 137 

tive one of doing as little harm as possible. Yet I 
lately heard a woman, overburdened almost to the 
point of breaking, say of her feeble mother, " As 
long as I can have her to look at and to speak to, 
she gives me all the help I need." And I heard 
another woman say of an invalid relative whose 
care had fallen on her, "Nobody could live in the 
house with my aunt and not be the better for it." 
Let me tell you, then, how some old people have 
borne their weakness. 

I knew one lovely old lady who had been the 
active centre of a large family. She was a little 
creature with an indomitable spirit. She had 
trained her children well, and they had gone from 
her to fill positions of usefulness. She was left 
alone with one unmarried son and her house- 
keeper. And then her power failed. The doctors 
said her heart was weak, and she knew the be- 
ginning of the end had come. She did not speak 
of this to any one. She quietly went on with her 
daily life, living as nearly as she could as she 
had been in the habit of doing, but giving up 
without a murmur — without even suggesting 
that she was giving up anything — things that 



138 OLD PEOPLE 

were beyond her strength. She appeared in 
the breakfast room every morning at the usual 
hour, and though her face was pale, she spoke 
in her usual cheerful tone, so that her son 
hardly realized that anything was changed. When 
she could, she still sewed a little, for she had 
been a notable seamstress. When she was able to 
walk a few rods, she went to church or she called 
upon her friends, as though her disabilities were 
only temporary and she still had social duties to 
fulfill. She welcomed the friends who came to see 
her with her usual interest though perhaps not 
with her old energy. She never spoke of being an 
invalid ; perhaps she did not even think of it, for 
her mind was occupied with larger affairs, plans 
for the good of the village, the well-being of her 
numerous children and grandchildren, and the 
news of the world. For she still read the news- 
papers daily as well as her Bible. She read books, 
too, sometimes, though their weight was almost 
too great for her frail strength. She faded slowly 
for a year or two, and by and by a daughter 
came to care for her. Still she rose punctually at 
the usual time, though she could not dress her- 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 139 

self without help, and she had to sit down while 
her daughter brushed her hair. " Why will you 
get up ? " asked the daughter gently. " There is no 
need of it." " No/' she answered, with equal gen- 
tleness, " but it is n't necessary for me to lie 
down. I shall be ready for that when it is time." 
And so a week passed by. Then one day she 
said she would lie in bed. And towards evening 
she called her son to her and gave him her 
Bible. And then she closed her eyes and slept 
and woke no more. I do not think her weakness 
was in vain to any one who watched her. 

In this case the weakness of the invalid did not 
place a great strain on anybody else; but I re- 
member another old lady who had to drink of a 
far bitterer cup. She had been all her life an ac- 
tively useful person, enthusiastically giving ser- 
vice without stint to all about her, and then, in 
her old age, she was attacked by a lingering and 
hopeless disease involving excruciating pain. And 
she had no money. She was dependent on a rela- 
tive whose health was wrecked, whose power to 
earn was fast failing, and who had other pressing 
calls. Her warm sympathy made her alive to all 



140 OLD PEOPLE 

this, and there were times when her beautiful 
courage and cheerfulness almost failed her. But 
she always rallied at once. She saw plainly that 
hard as things were, they would be easier for 
everybody if she could be cheerful, and she was 
cheerful. She had the happiness of knowing that 
though she must be in some sense a burden, it 
was a burden borne with love. She knew that 
if the end for the family should be the almshouse, 
as it sometimes seemed as if it must be, love 
would not fail even there. She indulged in no mor- 
bid complaints about her lot, but set herself re- 
solutely to make her corner of the world as bright 
as possible. Her energy in caring for herself with- 
out calling on others was really wonderful. She 
could not always help herself, but in the many 
years of suffering and weakness through which 
she was called to pass, I suppose that she never 
once asked anybody to do for her what she was 
able to do for herself, and she did many things 
that nobody else would have thought her able to 
do. Furthermore she entered with all her heart 
into every enjoyment still left to her. She could 
not go to see her friends ; but when they came to 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 141 

her, she received them with such animation and 
showed such a warm-hearted interest in all their 
weal and woe that they always went away happier, 
and usually with the impression that their hostess 
was not really very ill. She was interested in the 
affairs of the whole world, and instead of tiring 
her already weary relative with lamentations over 
her own helplessness, she would turn the current 
of thought by a lively discussion of the affairs of 
Holland, for instance, or China, so that her con- 
versation was a refreshment, a true recreation. In 
the midst of her life of pain, letters came to her 
from another old lady, a far-away cousin whom 
she had not seen for years, letters so full of peace 
and serenity and cheer that the day of their com- 
ing was a festival to the household. Sometimes 
she had strength to reply. There was an action 
and reaction of brave spirits in the correspondence 
of these two feeble old ladies that made sunshine 
in two widely separated homes. If our old lady read 
a good conundrum in a newspaper, she cut it out 
to amuse somebody else. If a little package came 
to her wrapped in fine paper, or tied with a 
bright cord, she saved the paper or the cord for 



142 OLD PEOPLE 

the paper dolls of some little girl. As long as she 
could knit stockings, she did so. When the weight 
of a stocking would bring on cruel pain, she knit 
holders, — bright-colored ones. In the home where 
she lived, pain and weakness and weariness were 
inevitable, not only for herself but for others, — 
and anxiety seemed inevitable, though perhaps it 
never is really so to those who accept perfectly the 
will of the Heavenly Father, — but the home was 
a happy one, a cheerful one. So much she must 
have seen and known herself. But she probably 
could not know that the discipline laid upon her 
relative through her own disabilities was that most 
needed. For this relative had a timid, anxious na- 
ture, and needed to learn how to walk erect under 
a load of anxiety. It was necessary, then, that the 
load should be one that clearly could not be cast 
off. A timid nature shirks responsibility except 
when love is so strong as to cast out fear. In this 
case the need of bearing the burden was unmis- 
takable, so the question was not how to shirk it, 
but how to bear it nobly. The body was pressed 
down by the load, but the heart expanded with 
the love by which alone it could be sustained. It 



WEAKNESS AND DEPENDENCE 143 

was in no figurative sense that the burden was a 
blessing. This old lady had done good to others 
all her life ; but the best thing she had ever done 
for any one was done at last unconsciously by the 
very weakness and dependence which seemed to 
take from her all power of doing anything. And 
though her work was unconsciously done, I do 
not think she could have done it at all if she had 
been less determined to make the very best of the 
circumstances. If she had been a willing or a fret- 
ful dependent, she could not have inspired the 
love that gave the strength needed to look up 
and not down. 

For the vast, unconscious power of single- 
minded consecration to the highest in one whose 
body is helpless to accomplish undreamed-of good, 
there is no better exposition than the well-known 
story of Miss Toosey's Mission, and this I re- 
commend to any old person who is weak, depend- 
ent and discouraged. 

Sometimes we wonder at the mystery of help- 
lessness. Why must we pass through such a dis- 



144 OLD PEOPLE 

cipline ? Even when we give most help to others, 
we may be as unconscious of it as Miss Toosey 
was. And do we need the discipline for ourselves ? 
How can it make us better ? All difficulties over- 
come make us better; but sometimes we grow 
weaker and weaker, and perhaps, like Miss Too- 
sey, we are at last too weak even to pray. Is there 
any meaning in such weakness as that ? Is not this 
the meaning — "We had thfe sentence of death 
in ourselves that we should not trust in ourselves, 
but in God which raiseth the dead " ? 



XI 

THE INNER LIFE OF THE OLD 

So long as the body is without a flaw, so long as 
every sense is perfect, we have not the key to the 
inner life of the old. Love indeed may persuade an 
aged friend to open his heart to us; but though 
love is the best half of sympathy, it is not all of 
it, and the old know that so well that they seldom 
try to express their inner life even to the warmest- 
hearted of their younger friends. 

Now let us lose a sense or a power, even tempo- 
rarily, and straightway we find in our hands the 
key we need. We may use it or not. That will be 
according to the largeness of our heart ; but hence- 
forward we have the intelligence which must sup- 
plement love in all effectual sympathy. 

One who has partially lost her hearing contrib- 
utes the following data to help those who would 
gladly understand the old if they could. She says 
she has an aged relative who is deaf enough to be 
shut out from ordinary conversation except when 



146 OLD PEOPLE 

the conditions are all favorable, and that many- 
people speak of this relative as having lost his 
mind. Her own deafness seems to be bounded by 
the same conditions, — an atmosphere whose den- 
sity will cause the barometer to stand at thirty 
inches, a well-lighted room (though she is not con- 
scious of watching the speaker's lips) and freedom 
from distracting noises outside, while much de- 
pends on the state of the nerves and on the posi- 
tion of the speaker whose voice must be sent out 
directly towards her. As she is still vigorous and 
alert, as all her other senses are unimpaired, and 
as her affliction is so recent that she is still in 
touch with all around her and familiar with their 
subjects of conversation, and as she is aware of 
the conditions she needs in order to understand 
others, and therefore often able to command them, 
her disability is not painfully conspicuous, and no 
one dreams of ignoring her presence in any circle 
where chat is going on. Not so in the case of the 
old man. All his senses are depleted, and he can- 
not draw on one of them to supply the deficit of 
another. Even if he has discovered the condi- 
tions necessary to his hearing, he has hardly 



THE INNER LIFE OF THE OLD 147 

vigor enough now to command any of them. 
Moreover, he has so long been shut out from in- 
tercourse with others that he must hear a whole 
sentence in order to understand it, while with his 
younger relative, a word may be enough. So he 
sits apart, silent, and apparently stupid. But my 
friend says that all this is no evidence that he 
has lost his mind in any degree. Having no 
senses is a very different thing from having no 
sense, as we all acknowledge in the wonderful 
case of Helen Keller. Some one may ask if it 
is not unfortunate to cite Helen Keller here, since 
she appears to be really brilliant, in spite of her 
deprivations, while the old man seems to be stupid. 
But it must be remembered that unwearied pains 
is being taken to connect Helen Keller with the 
outside world, and the unusual scientific interest 
in her case has given her extraordinary oppor- 
tunities ; even without these it is a law of nature 
that parents and teachers eagerly work to de- 
velop the young. Moreover, her youth itself gives 
her the bodily vigor which is especially necessary 
to supplement defective senses. 

The children of the old, however they may 



148 OLD PEOPLE 

love their parents, are, for obvious reasons, un- 
likely to take the interest in their development 
that parents take in that of children, nor do they 
even feel any responsibility about it ; and yet an 
old person deprived of a sense is put into a new 
environment which may demand a new education 
as definitely as if he were a child. He is " moving 
about in worlds not realized." I used to suppose 
old people were not self-conscious enough to know 
their own failings. Most young people think so. 
I have a suspicion now that they are keeping a 
great deal to themselves. There is no doubt that 
age does sometimes dull the mind ; but self-con- 
sciousness is usually retained long after the senses 
become dulled, and while it is retained, I am con- 
vinced the old use great self-control, more, indeed, 
than is possible to the young. My friend thinks 
that as our love expands, we shall find a way to 
help the old to fuller expression. We shall not try 
to educate them in any domineering or patroniz- 
ing way ; but we may really educate in the ety- 
mological sense of drawing out what is within 
them. My friend is sure that when the time comes, 
we shall find that the unexplored mine of the 



THE INNER LIFE OF THE OLD 149 

inner life of the old is rich beyond all our dreams, 
that its treasures compared with those of the mind 
of youth are as diamonds to charcoal. The weight 
and stress of years and the heat generated in the 
conflict of life have crystallized the dull carbon 
into a gem. 

Of the existence of such a mine of wealth I 
have no doubt, but probably even love will fail 
to draw out all its treasures in this world, because 
the old have no vigor. They have lost the instru- 
ment of expression. They can still express moral 
beauty, because that is shown by patience, gentle- 
ness, and fortitude, as clearly as by active love ; 
but their intellectual jewels lie too deeply imbed- 
ded in the rubbish of the decaying senses to be 
easily brought to light by even the most whole- 
hearted delver. An occasional fragment will richly 
reward the worker, but for the full beauty of the 
substratum we must wait till the senses are en- 
tirely cleared away. 



XII 

THE RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 

Long ago I saw at an Art Exhibition a picture of 
an old lady, leaning on the arm of a young girl 
who was leading her gently through a garden to 
a little chapel. Both faces were as serene as the 
beautiful sunset light that touched them. The 
picture stirred me so much that, longing to look 
like the young girl, I enthusiastically offered my 
own arm to an elderly relative. But my relative had 
no wish to appear in the role of the old lady. She 
rejected my arm with a look that would have with- 
ered me, if it had not made me laugh. Thereupon 
I discovered that I had been posing, and that 
nothing had been farther from my thoughts than 
the comfort of my old friend, who had not the 
least need of an arm to lean upon. The drudgery 
the young are often called upon to go through for 
the sake of the old is not often of the sort that 
lends itself to the composition of a picture. It is 
certainly a pleasant sight to see a row of school- 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 151 

girls rise in a crowded car to offer a seat to an elder 
lady ; but I have sometimes observed a certain dis- 
may in the countenance of the lady thus honored, 
as if she were saying to herself that the sprinkling 
of white in her hair must be more conspicuous than 
she had supposed. The dismay, however, always 
gives way to relief : for no one but an athlete finds 
it easy to stand in a car, and the girls are quite 
right to make their little sacrifice. 

I once heard several ladies discussing Alice 
Brown's inimitable story of Heartsease, and the 
too devoted daughter-in-law of the delightful Old 
Lady Lamson. You remember that the young 
woman would never allow her mother-in-law to 
" lift a finger," and that when she was called away 
from home for a few days, the old lady of eighty, 
taking advantage of her absence, sat up most of 
the night to wash and iron, and to take a midnight 
stroll, — pleasures that she knew full well her care- 
ful daughter-in-law would never have allowed her 
to engage in. At last one gentle lady, whose con- 
science perhaps overbalanced her sense of humor, 
said hesitatingly, " But after all, when so many 
young people are not thoughtful to shield the old 



152 OLD PEOPLE 

from working too hard, is n't it almost a pity to 
make fun of the poor daughter-in-law who tried to 
be kind, even though she overdid her part ?" Now, 
what is it to be kind? Is it not to enter so fully 
into the feelings of others that we try to do what 
is best for them ? The Old Lady Lamson did need 
care, no doubt, but she was still a very capable 
woman. Her daughter-in-law sincerely wished her 
well. But if she had loved her, she would have 
known that the dear old lady needed activity. So 
I think that Miss Brown's lesson is not too severe. 

The relations between the old and the young 
are really hard to adjust. The two ages can live 
happily together only by sacrifices on both sides; 
but they will never make the right sacrifices unless 
they love each other enough to try to take each 
other's point of view. 

" I wish, oh, how I wish," I heard a daughter 
say anxiously, " that my mother, who is eighty- 
three, would only let us do what is best for her ! " 
I did not know the mother. Perhaps she may have 
needed guidance as much as a little child, and per- 
haps, in taking her own way, she selfishly laid an 
unnecessary burden on her children. That is not 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 153 

unusual in old people who cannot bear to give up 
the control they have exercised so long; but some- 
times the younger generation are thinking of them- 
selves and not of their parents when they wish 
their fathers and mothers would be guided. Some- 
times it is the parents who are oppressed and some- 
times the children. 

Each case stands by itself, and no outsider can 
comprehend it. We must then forbear to criticise. 
Dearly as parents and children love each other, their 
relations are often a means of discipline to the most 
affectionate. To show why this must sometimes be, 
let us take a shining example, — King Edward VII. 
How tenderly he loved Queen Victoria it is impos- 
sible to say, but at all events he was apparently 
always a dutiful son. Yet consider what a discipline 
his life had been. Though destined to be king of 
a mighty nation, he was forced to be merely a 
cipher till he was almost sixty years old. He could 
not lay aside his inheritance, and, following a nat- 
ural bent, make himself a power in some original 
way. He must have been aware, too, as the years 
fled by while he remained inactive, that the prob- 
ability of his making a mark upon the world was 



154 OLD PEOPLE 

less and less. A man who has to learn a new pro- 
fession at sixty is certainly handicapped. Of course 
it may be said that King Edward had been learn- 
ing his profession all his life ; but it is one thing 
to work as an observer, and another to work as 
an actor. Of course a statesman should not be too 
young. We seldom choose a President under fifty; 
but the men who are to be Presidents have been 
free all their lives to show the stuff that is in them. 
Probably Edward VII was a better king at sixty 
than he would have been at thirty, but his years 
of waiting must have been difficult. He could not 
wish that his mother should die, and yet while she 
lived he could hardly follow his own complete life. 
Only a philosopher or a saint could have done that. 
Yet the discipline he was called to receive could 
not be evaded and had to be met in the right 
way. 

The life of his sister Victoria must have been 
still more trying. When she married Frederick of 
Prussia, she and her husband were perfectly united, 
and they determined to prepare themselves to do 
the utmost in their power for the good of Ger- 
many. They studied all their lives to fit themselves 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 155 

to be an enlightened Emperor and Empress. And 
still the Emperor William lived on, an old man 
who, though upright, and living up to his own 
ideals, yet looked to ideals less lofty than those 
of his son. When he died, his son was already 
dying, and had no opportunity in the few months 
remaining to him to carry out the cherished plans 
he had been working upon all his life. And his 
son, who succeeded him, held very different stand- 
ards, and the dowager Empress Victoria, retiring 
from the Court, had to see the hopes of a lifetime, 
which had drawn her always nearer and nearer to 
her husband, dashed forever to the ground. Under 
the two Williams, Germany has become a great 
nation, probably a greater nation than if Frederick 
had stood at the head of it : for Frederick and 
Victoria held that right should always take pre- 
cedence of might, while even the good William I 
could not resist Bismarck, who would never lose 
an opportunity for a scruple. A German friend 
once said to me in reference to a questionable 
transaction which greatly increased the power of 
Germany, that of course it was not strictly just, 
but " Bismarck ist schrecklich king' 9 And so Vic- 



156 OLD PEOPLE 

toria's noble ideals were all effaced by the "terrible 
cleverness" of Bismarck. Yet it would have been 
criminal in her to wish for the death of her father- 
in-law, even if she had not loved him, — and he 
was well worthy of being loved, — and she was 
called upon to believe that what seemed to her to 
be a failure in righteousness was to be overruled 
for the highest good of her country. Here the 
tragedy of her life and that of her husband was 
clearly due to the simple, natural fact that the old 
Emperor lived more than eighty years. 

I mention these cases because they are in every- 
body's mind ; but all about us there are instances 
to be seen of men and women whose natural aims 
in life are frustrated by the necessity of subordi- 
nating them to some old person. When this dis- 
cipline is plainly inevitable there is nothing to do 
but to bear it with patience and courage, remem- 
bering that the work we think we are fitted for in 
life is often not our true work at all, and that He 
Who has given us the discipline knows better than 
we do what is good for us. But when the discipline 
is not inevitable, there may be room for resist- 
ance. 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 157 

I have in mind a fine old gentleman who lived 
far on into the eighties. He lost his wife in middle 
life, and all his affections were concentrated on an 
only daughter, who was in turn devoted to him, so 
that when she married it seemed most natural that 
her husband should make one of the household 
already established. The three lived together in 
harmony for many years, the young people gladly 
ministering to the old gentleman in every way. 
He was a man of strong mind. He had his own 
pursuits, and was a power in the community. The 
son-in-law and the daughter were also persons of 
strong mind. They, too, were efficient in the com- 
munity. No one, looking on, could have thought 
that their lives were at all seriously hampered by 
their father, and it probably never so much as en- 
tered his head that it was so, — and yet there was 
a sense in which he domineered over them. The 
home was fashioned entirely after his own ideas. 
It was he who bought the new carpets and chose 
the new wall-papers. He engaged the cook and 
gave the orders for dinner. It was he who decided 
when a dinner-party should be given and who the 
guests were to be. The hours for meals and for 



158 OLD PEOPLE 

rising and for going to bed were arranged by 
him. The time for going into the country in the 
summer was selected to suit his convenience. In 
this way the young people became elderly peo- 
ple without once having the delight of making a 
home according to their own sweet will. It must 
not, however, be supposed that this old gentleman 
was a Mr. Turveydrop, or that his unselfish chil- 
dren were as blind to the facts in the case as Caddy 
Jellyby and Prince. The father was a high-minded 
man who would have been ready to sacrifice his 
life for a principle, or even for the children whom 
he loved, if that had happened to be the kind of 
sacrifice required of him. And he had such excel- 
lent ideas in regard to the management of a house- 
hold that his home was a very agreeable one. 
Perhaps if the young people had been free to 
follow their own bent, the home would not have 
been essentially different in the eyes of other peo- 
ple. Still, they were not free, and they were much 
too clear-sighted not to be aware of it. They 
knew what they were doing when they chose to 
make their sacrifices for their father; the only 
difficulty was that he had no idea what they were 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 159 

doing. They need not have lived with him ; but it 
might have broken his heart if they had left him. 
They loved him, and for the sake of their love, 
they chose to sacrifice their freedom. All three 
were thoroughly well-bred people, and therefore 
there was never any friction in the family. The 
daughter had too much individuality not to pre- 
sent her father, from time to time, with her views 
on the household regime, and occasionally her 
quiet statement of the case prevailed with him. If 
not, she never urged the matter. And her hus- 
band, whose individuality was equally forcible, 
felt that, for every reason, it was better for differ- 
ences of opinion to be presented to the old gentle- 
man by the daughter. 

Now I think it was unfortunate that these 
young people could not have the happiness of 
creating their own home atmosphere. I think 
their home would have been a greater blessing 
to every one if it could have expressed them- 
selves. On the other hand, it would have been 
a sore trial to the old gentleman to give up the 
expression of his own individuality in his home. 
Perhaps if he had realized the magnitude of the 



160 OLD PEOPLE 

sacrifice he exacted, he would have chosen to live 
by himself, and let his children have a home near 
him. Such a solution of such a difficulty is often 
the best. But, in this case, it seems as if it really 
was better to combine the households: for the 
daughter was an only child and had no children 
of her own, so that there were none of the ordinary 
complications; and a home that is ordered exactly 
according to our own ideas does not usually 
afford sufficient scope for the daily self-sacrifice 
which is the necessary nutriment of love. I 
think the young people were right to give up 
their fancies, though I am not disposed to criticise 
them because their sense of humor led them to 
make an occasional dry comment on what they re- 
nounced. But what shall I say of the old gentle- 
man ? He ought not to have been blind. He ought 
to have known that, in the nature of things, the 
young people must wish to plan their own life. It 
was his house, to be sure, but I think he should 
have left the ordering of it largely to his daughter. 
It is very hard to be individual and to be unselfish 
at the same time. We certainly not only have a 
right to express ourselves, but it is only when we 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 161 

express ourselves — that is, when we express the 
best that is in us — that we are of any use in the 
world ; yet the more we crave expression for our- 
selves, the more mindful we should be that others 
have the same need, and we must stand ready 
to sacrifice what interferes with the best life of 
another. It is only by remembering this that we 
can be saved — if we have a strong personality 
— from becoming domineering old people. 

Sometimes the friction between old and young 
is in reference to the merest trifles ; but we all 
know by experience that we are as likely to be 
irritated by trifles as by affairs of importance. An 
old lady of my acquaintance, now eighty-four 
years of age, boasted the distinction of having in 
her girlhood a grandmother, a great-grandmother 
and a great-great-grandmother all living at the 
same time. Naturally the batteries of criticism 
turned upon the youngest generation were heavy. 
A girl friend, on a visit to New York, sent home 
to my acquaintance a daguerreotype of herself, the 
first daguerreotype the girl had ever seen. De- 
lighted with the gift, she set it up on the mantel- 



162 OLD PEOPLE 

piece. She had hardly done so when, to use her 
own words, u Great-grandmother came in and saw 
it. She pointed to it with her long index finger, 
and exclaimed severely, ' An idol ! an idol ! ' : ' The 
girl's mother came hastily forward to help the old 
lady off with her cloak, and dexterously interposing 
herself between great-grandmother and the offend- 
ing picture, signed to her daughter to take it 
away. So the precious portrait was speedily locked 
up in a drawer, and the girl took care to keep the 
key in her own pocket. 

My acquaintance, in telling the story, moralized 
a little on the theme, " temporal mores!" 
Certainly, times are changed, and the present old 
lady of that vigorous line of grandmothers takes 
great satisfaction in modern progress, though she 
confesses that she does not like to see a young 
lady ride a bicycle, and no exigency will ever be- 
guile her into the use of a post-card. 

Sympathy is a large part of love, but it requires 
the loving exercise of the intellect to sympathize 
really with others. This is especially true of the 
relations between old and young. We sympathize 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 163 

with those of our own age because we understand 
them. Their feelings are like our own. But the 
young and old have different feelings, and they 
cannot understand each other unless they think 
about each other. They must try to understand 
iBach other, and that involves a distinct act of the 
will. Even then, the young cannot always put 
themselves in the place of the old, for they have 
no experience to guide them. But the old ought 
to be able to put themselves in the place of the 
young, for they ought to remember what they 
used to feel. Yet it often seems as if the young, 
through imagination, more frequently have true 
sympathy with the old, than the old, through mem- 
ory, have with the young. Other things being 
equal, bodily strength and vigor add to our power 
to love. 

The demands that the young make on the old 
are not usually very great. The young feel 
strength for their own work, and so do not much 
care whether the old do anything or not, though 
sometimes they feel as Anthony Trollope says he 
did in contemplating his mother's activity, as if it 
were in the natural course of things that a lady 



164 OLD PEOPLE 

of fifty-eight should support the family. But or- 
dinarily, when the young fail toward the old, it is 
by not entering into their feelings. 

" How the spirit of curiosity does grow upon 
my mother ! " a gentle lady once said to me, with 
an air of vexation foreign to her usual manner. 
She said this, because her mother, in passing 
through the room, had deliberately stopped to 
pick up some letters lying on the table, and had 
taken out her glasses to examine the superscrip- 
tions. There was nothing at all private about the 
letters, and the daughter had tossed them care- 
lessly on the table where anybody might see the 
addresses. Indeed, young eyes could hardly fail to 
see them. I had seen them myself without taking 
the slightest interest in them. I am certain that 
the old lady had no wish to pry into her daugh- 
ter's affairs, and that if she had supposed there 
was any objection to her knowing to whom the 
letters were written, she would never have touched 
them. But she could not see at a glance what the 
rest of us saw involuntarily. Her hearing was a 
little dull, too, and she knew very little of what 
was going on about her. I suppose putting on her 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 165 

glasses to look at the letters was an automatic ac- 
tion to keep herself in touch with the family. I 
am sure the daughter's annoyance came from her 
want of comprehension of her mother and not 
from a fault of the mother : and yet I then made 
a resolution that when my eyes failed, I would 
never put on my glasses to look at the superscrip- 
tion of other people's letters. 

I lately heard a lady say : " Twenty years ago 
I criticised my mother continually, — her speech, 
her table-manners, her dress, her choice of friends, 
her choice of books, and a thousand little habits 
that were unpleasant to me. Now I find myself 
doing exactly the same things she did, and I know 
very well why I do them. I drop crumbs on the 
floor because I can't see, and I mispronounce 
words because I can't hear how others pronounce 
them ; I wear a loose dress because I am not strong 
enough to endure a close one; I am nervously 
afraid of being late when I am to take a train, 
because I am too weak to hurry. I can see that I 
irritate my young people exactly as I used to be 
irritated myself. And my habits would be still 
worse than they are if I did not remember how 



166 OLD PEOPLE 

I used to feel about my mother's shortcomings. 
Even with that lively remembrance, circumstances 
are too strong for me, and my repentance for my 
old intolerance grows deeper and deeper ; but I 
hope all this experience helps me a little both in 
resisting my tendency to bad habits, and in for- 
giving my young people when they show their 
annoyance." 

Though the young do not make great demands 
on the old, — indeed to many old people the trag- 
edy of their lot seems to be that others make so 
few demands on them, — the old must often make 
great demands on the young. " The old bleat after 
the young," a busy physician once said to me, in 
explaining why he could not take any vacation, 
since he must then leave his feeble father, ninety- 
four years old, behind him in the city. He would 
not run the risk of letting the old man long for 
him in vain. "I have never been able," he said, 
"to get even with my parents." When I looked 
puzzled at this expression, he explained : " My 
father and mother did so much for me that no- 
thing I have ever been able to do for them can in 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 167 

the least compare with it. No sacrifice that I can 
make weighs anything in the balance." And so 
he stayed faithfully by his father till the old man 
died. 

The demand that the very old are sometimes 
forced to make on the next generation who are 
already beginning to feel the infirmities of age is 
so great that it cannot be borne without almost 
crushing those who have to bear it ; and so, as we 
grow old, we must all try to lighten the burden 
we lay on others as far as we can ; but so far as 
this burden is necessary, it carries with it a bless- 
ing, even when the body faints under it. 

At fifty or sixty, though we are comparatively 
young as regards those of eighty or ninety, we 
are yet so old as to feel sometimes that we should 
ourselves be cared for instead of being called on 
to care for others : and yet it is the young-old peo- 
ple who can often do most to make the very old 
people happy. Their own failing powers teach 
them a sympathy that is almost beyond the reach 
of the young. I know persons of fifty or sixty who 
feel alone because they are shut out from much 
of the society of the young. They long to do for 



168 OLD PEOPLE 

the young and keep their place with them. And 
this is right. It is well for both that old and young 
should associate with each other. But the sexage- 
narians who find themselves shut out from the 
young need not be lonely : for they have it in 
their power to be to the very old what they wish 
the young would be to them. To the contempo- 
raries of their fathers and mothers they still seem 
young; but they have stores of memories and 
tastes in common with them, and in sharing these 
they find a new and often delightful companion- 
ship that saves them from the loneliness they had 
begun to suffer. 

What can the old give to the young? Can 
they give experience? Not often. New times call 
for new manners, and even if it were not so, the 
young insist upon their own experience. Can they 
give wisdom ? Sometimes. But the wisdom of age 
means nothing to others, unless it has been learned 
by actually living it, even though the precepts 
may be true. " When you have learned a thing 
in a book," said Mr. Squeers, "then go and know 
it. C-1-e-a-n-w-i-n-d-e-r, clean winder. When the 



RELATIONS OF THE OLD AND YOUNG 169 

boy at Dotheboys Hall knows this out of book, 
he goes and does it." This according to Mr. 
Squeers is the " practical system/' the " regular 
education system." 

Wisdom is something higher than experience ; 
but, unless it is based upon it, when we try to im- 
part it to others, it does not ring true. 



XIII 

AFTER FOURSCORE 

" Old ! " says an octogenarian of my acquaintance, 
speaking of a contemporary. " He is n't old — not 
much past eighty." Another old gentleman speaks 
naively of the " Harmon girls " — one of the sis- 
ters being over ninety — just as he has been in 
the habit of doing ever since he was a boy. I know 
an attractive old lady, already past eighty, who of- 
ten remarks, " When I am old, I am going to do" 
this or that. Her grandchildren smile ; but she 
speaks in perfect good faith. No doubt if the ques- 
tion were put squarely before her, she would ac- 
knowledge that she is already old. She is not exempt 
from aches and pains, and she has reason enough 
to answer as another of my octogenarian friends 
used to do when anybody congratulated her on her 
wonderful vigor : " The days of our years are three- 
score years and ten, and if, by reason of strength, 
they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor 
and sorrow." But I suppose that she has grown old 



AFTER FOURSCORE 171 

so gently and gradually, relinquishing one youth- 
ful habit after another, that she has never realized 
how much her whole manner of life has changed. 
In youth and middle-age, we all say, " When I am 
old, I shall do " so and so, understanding that a 
time may come when we cannot do what we are 
then doing ; and so with my friend. She is think- 
ing of the best way to meet disabilities to come, 
being happily oblivious to her present ones. 

" Old age " is a large phrase. Most people know 
something of its reality at fifty ; but there is a 
world-wide difference between fifty and a hundred, 
so that the most elementary studies in age must 
take note of the conditions among the very old. 
When the descent of life is gradual, it is not usu- 
ally painful, and the pilgrim lies down to rest at 
the foot almost as one might go to sleep. To those 
who are blessed with a healthy body, and who live 
rationally, such an experience is not uncommon. 
A clear mind, interested in the life about one, 
and a large heart, forgetting one's self in loving 
others, are also factors in the same result. Worry 
entangles the nerves and is disastrous. And many 
people suffer unavoidably from the strain of both 



172 OLD PEOPLE 

the physical burdens and of the mental and moral 
troubles they are appointed to endure. Few lives 
are without strain; and could we wish them to be? 
Struggle develops character. 

Whatever the reason may be, even the best- 
endowed men and women, and even those who have 
lived most wisely, seldom reach the age of eighty 
without some definite breaking. I have watched 
many who have worn their years so lightly till 
after seventy that no one thought much of their 
being old, even though it was fitting to concede 
certain privileges to them. But even in such cases, 
a change comes at about seventy-five, and " if, 
by reason of strength," their years " be fourscore, 
yet is their strength labor and sorrow," or, if not 
" labor and sorrow," still pain and weakness. Now, 
it is of those in their last decade that I wish to 
speak. 

And first, let me say that those are happiest 
themselves and do most to make others happy who 
think and say least about being old even after the 
eightieth milestone is passed. There is a hopeful 
attitude in the octogenarian who talks about what 
he shall do when he is old, that helps him to do 



AFTER FOURSCORE 173 

more now than if he declares life to be over for 
him. He may not be able, like General Radetsky, 
at eighty-two, to turn back the wheels of progress, 
by stamping out a revolution in Italy, or even to 
rival the famous Samuel Whittemore of Arling- 
ton, who, at the age of eighty, killed three British 
soldiers on April 19, 1775, and then, after being 
shot, bayonetted, beaten, and left for dead, had 
vitality enough left to live to the age of ninety- 
eight ; but we have all heard of the old man who 
planted an acorn when his son and grandson re- 
fused to do it on the ground that it would take an 
oak so long to grow that they should never have 
any advantage from it. But he lived to sit under 
the shade of the tree. The planting of that acorn 
might have offset many years of helplessness : for 
the old man conferred a blessing on the neigh- 
borhood that continued for generations after he 
was gone. 

I once read a short paper in some magazine 
which set forth a principle calling for emphasis 
here. " When I was thirty years old," said the 
writer, " I often said to myself, of something I 
wished to have power to do, ' Oh, if I had only 



174 OLD PEOPLE 

begun to practice this at twenty, what a help 
it would be now ! ' But at fif ty, I found myself 
saying, 6 Oh, if I could have realized at thirty what 
it was still in my power to do ! ' And at seventy, 
I say, i Oh, if I had only begun at fifty ! ' : 

So my friend who became blind at eighty-two 
did not say that it was not worth while for him 
to try to learn to do anything more in this world ; 
he set himself diligently to see what he could still 
do. He is now eighty-eight. I met him the other 
day, and he mentioned, with a triumphant smile, 
that he could chop and split wood, and make a 
fire. A few days later I received a letter from him, 
written in an excellent hand. He had not told 
me that he had taught himself to write. His letter 
enclosed a typewritten essay on the Compensa- 
tions of Blindness which I should like to incor- 
porate in full into this chapter. He evidently 
finds a new zest in life in learning to do one thing 
after another without his eyes. Life is still pro- 
gress to him. Everybody enjoys his society, and 
no one can see the placid expression of his face 
or hear his pleasant voice without believing that 
he is happy. He will, I am sure, welcome the great 



AFTER FOURSCORE 175 

change which must soon come to him ; yet, mean- 
while, he finds his life very good. He repeated 
to me, in a cheerful tone, Whittier's lines, — 

" And so beside the Silent Sea 
I wait the muffled oar ; 
No harm from Him can come to me 
On ocean or on shore." 

" I have been making a call," said an old lady 
of eighty-nine, with a twinkle in her eye. In these 
days, it had become her prerogative to let her 
friends call upon her ; so it was evident that her 
call must have some special significance. " I have 
been to call upon a lady ninety-eight years of age," 
she continued, " and it is not very often now that 
I have an opportunity to call on anybody nine 
years older than I am myself." You see she real- 
ized her social duties still. All her other friends 
must call upon her. But here it was plainly her 
place to make the call, and she made it with de- 
light, though she was so frail that the exertion 
demanded was by no means small. Now that is 
a beautiful spirit to see in a person almost ninety 
years old. Indeed, it would be well to begin to 
cultivate that spirit at fifty, or even earlier. 



176 OLD PEOPLE 

I remember a fine old lady who, when her 
strength failed so that she could no longer live 
the life of active usefulness to which she had been 
accustomed, was still one of the greatest benefac- 
tors of the village because she made such wise 
suggestions to her friends who were still active 
but who had less insight into the real needs of the 
people. Even in making her will, she continued 
to sow good seed. She had outlived all her large 
family, and the will by which she disposed of her 
small property was full of details that were touch- 
ing to those who stood near enough to know her 
reasons for them. Two or three hundred dollars 
here, and two or three hundred dollars there made 
dull reading to a stranger ; but in every case that 
trifle of money fell like dew on parched ground : 
for it was given to those who were bearing the 
burden and heat of the day, and who saw no possi- 
bility of providing shelter for themselves. And the 
last clause of the will directed that the bric-a- 
brac in her own room should be divided among 
the Sunday-School children. 

" It is not growing like a tree 
In bulk, doth make men better be. 



AFTER FOURSCORE 177 

Nor standing long an oak, three hundred year, 
To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere. 

A lily of a day 

Is fairer far in May. 
Although it fall and die that night — 
It was the plant and flower of Light. 
In small proportions we just beauties see, 
And in short measures life may perfect be." 

A long life to no purpose, — how very sad ! A 
short life filled to the brim, — how beautiful ! A 
young life, full of powers and possibilities, intent 
only on its own gratification, — how grievous ! 
But an aged life, frail and circumscribed, yet one 
in which every spark of the dying embers is used 
to give light and warmth to some other life, — how 
rich it is ! 

It is a trick of speech to talk about the garru- 
lity of the old. My own observation would lead 
me to think that the old talk much less than the 
young. But their conversation is often on sub- 
jects that do not interest their hearers, and so 
they are voted tedious. I will not altogether de- 
fend them. It is right that the old as well as the 
young should remember their interlocutor, and 



178 OLD PEOPLE 

that they should be sympathetic in conversation 
instead of indulging in a monologue. But their 
impatient listeners often miss something that is 
priceless when they cut short the reminiscences 
of their old friends. No book can give us the 
vivid realization of the recent past that we get 
from such conversation. The longer a man lives, 
the more valuable his recollections become. The 
battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815 ; yet I am 
proud to say that in my girlhood I once talked 
with a man who was present on that field. He was 
a boy when he went into that action, and when I 
saw him he was an old, old man, retired from 
service after having risen to be general-in-ehief 
of the whole army of one of the German states. 
When there is only one survivor of a battle left, 
he may tell its story over and over again, and no 
new listener who is not altogether wrapped up in 
his own petty every-day affairs will call him gar- 
rulous. 

Another old friend of my youth lived to the age 
of ninety-eight, and from him I once had an excit- 
ing description of the panic in these United States 
in the early days of the nineteenth century, when 



AFTER FOURSCORE 179 

Napoleon I was triumphantly binding one Euro- 
pean country after another to his victorious chariot 
wheels, till it was apprehended that in the dearth 
of new worlds to conquer, he would soon pounce 
upon our young republic. The same old gentleman 
once gave me a lively account of his voyage up the 
Hudson in Fulton's steamer, the Clermont, on 
her first trip from New York to Albany in 1807, 
he being then a very young fellow, and almost 
losing this chance of a lifetime by the dilatori- 
ness of a lady who was to accompany him, and 
who stopped too long to " prink." 

If young people could realize at all how much 
their study of history would be enlivened by 
conversations with their great-grandparents, they 
would, perhaps, oftener think it worth while to sit 
down beside them and ask them a few leading 
questions about the past. The old people would 
be delighted to answer in full: for here they 
are on their own ground. They know their sub- 
ject, and they know, too, and rejoice in the con- 
sciousness, that the gift they bestow is unique as 
well as valuable, — that they alone have it to 
give. 



180 OLD PEOPLE 

No one has learned all the lessons of life who 
has not had the discipline of loneliness. Most 
people who reach fourscore have this discipline. I 
have known a few beautiful exceptions. Some- 
times a husband and wife who have been devoted 
to each other all their lives live to the same great 
age and die within a few days of each other. I 
have known two congenial maiden sisters who 
made a delightful home together till they were 
both past eighty. Then one drooped, and quickly 
died, and within the month the other, too, had 
passed. Often a mother or father is tenderly 
watched to the last by an affectionate child ; but in 
that case, there must be, after all, an experience of 
loneliness, because the child belongs to a younger 
generation, and is shut out from much of the par- 
ent's past. 

In the numerous cases where the old person lives 
alone, or has only servants about him, or even 
when he is a member of an affectionate family, 
loneliness becomes a deep experience. Many peo- 
ple sink under it completely, and I have often 
wondered if it might not be as potent as any physi- 
cal cause in producing the enfeeblement of mind 



AFTER FOURSCORE 181 

so frequent in extreme old age. In the prime 
of life we can fight against loneliness by work ; 
but when the working days are over, the resistant 
power cannot be in work. Is there any resistant 
power anywhere left to us ? 

" When the world is cold to you, 
Go build fires to warm it," 

Miss Larcom says. The fires the old build must be 
kindled in the heart. If the family have all gone 
away on a pleasure excursion and have left you 
alone to brood over your weakness, is it really 
necessary to brood? Wouldn't this be a good 
time to make a new pinball for that careless grand- 
child who forgot to kiss you when she went, and 
who has lost the pinball you made for her at 
Christmas ? Suppose you make it of black velvet 
and yellow satin, because she likes those colors. 
You work so slowly now, and are so weak when 
you are excited by any disturbance that it is for- 
tunate for you to have a whole day of perfect quiet 
to fashion your little gift. It keeps your hands 
and thoughts busy half the day, and then you are 
tired enough to take a little nap. And when the 
gay party come bursting into the dining-room at 



182 OLD PEOPLE 

supper-time, the corners of your mouth twitch with 
a pleased little smile as you think what is under 
the tiny maid's plate. And then she finds your 
gift, and cries out, " Hurrah ! Grandma ! I know 
who made this/' and comes and gives you a per- 
fectly spontaneous hug far sweeter than the per- 
functory kiss she forgot in the morning. I am not 
saying that you had not reason to feel chilled in 
the morning, but only suggesting that the chill 
need not last all day. 

Even a pinball may be an impossible achieve- 
ment. The days come when the grasshopper is a 
burden. But if the middle-aged lady who has just 
called on your daughter-in-law had only thought 
to ask for you, you think you could still have en- 
tertained her quite as well as your daughter-in-law, 
— better, in fact, for your daughter-in-law could 
think of nothing to talk about but the servants, 
though she tells you that the lady has just been 
to visit the Whittier birthplace : so you are pretty 
sure she would have been interested in hearing 
some of your own reminiscences of Whittier. 
Well, she does n't care a fig for you, that is clear, 
and she probably does n't care much for Whittier, 



AFTER FOURSCORE 183 

either. Why should you trouble yourself about 
her ? (I have heard of old ladies crying for such 
neglect as this.) You say to yourself that if she 
had asked for you you could have shown her that 
autograph of Whittier you have, and you have 
heard that she is interested in autographs. Well, 
she does n't know what she has lost. Doesn't she ? 
Why should she lose anything? You take the auto- 
graph out of its envelope and read in Whittier's 
clear, exquisite handwriting, the words, — 

" He needs the earthly city not 
Who hath the heavenly won," 

and you realize that the words apply to something 
besides cities. When your daughter-in-law returns 
Mrs. 's call, you entrust the precious auto- 
graph to her. " Tell your friend that hearing she 
had been to see Whittier's birthplace, I thought 
she might be interested in this," you say. She is 
delighted. She brings it back in person, and you 
have a charming hour with her. Perhaps she tells 
you to your face that when she heard that your 
daughter-in-law's mother-in-law was coming to 
live with her, she had no idea how much that was 
going to add to her own pleasure, but that now 



184 OLD PEOPLE 

she has seen you, she hopes you will let her call 
often. You still think she might have thought of 
you before, and you are perfectly aware that as a 
point of etiquette she should have made the first 
advances; but still you do not see any reason why 
at your age you should allow a point of etiquette 
to interfere either with her pleasure or your own, 
and so you make a friend. Henceforth you have 
fewer lonely hours ; but that is not the reason you 
are glad you made the advance. You did not do 
it for your own sake but for hers. You meant to 
give her pleasure and you succeeded. Your own 
pleasure is simply a reflex. Of course you might 
not have succeeded. And when you try and fail, 
sometimes your heart grows cold. But, after all, 
is it not worth while to try ? Why should you 
take counsel of pride and mortification instead of 
love and hope? It sometimes seems, I know, as if 
a tender heart is more frequently bruised than a 
hard one; and yet who would not choose the ten- 
der heart ? 

A cheerful octogenarian friend often states it 
as her conviction that fads are a great blessing to 



AFTER FOURSCORE 185 

the old. They save them from loneliness and give 
their minds a constant interest. She herself has 
two fads, as she chooses to call them. She collects 
postage stamps. As she is very neat and her eye- 
sight still holds out, she is able to keep her al- 
bums in admirable condition, and she works over 
each new stamp with affectionate care. Time is 
not an object with her, so she can spend as much 
of it as is needed in removing the stamp carefully 
from its envelope and in placing it perfectly in 
line in her book. She says she has learned more 
geography from her stamps than she ever did at 
school, and they have given her a living interest 
in the whole world. There are days when she 
passes hours over her albums. And it is her delight 
to set children working in this direction. She al- 
ways has a store of duplicate stamps sufficient to 
start the little amateur well on the way, and she is 
unwearied in teaching him how to keep his album 
in good order. Incidentally her stamps have been 
the means of her making many fast friends among 
the young people. And they have often led to a 
charming correspondence with other collectors. 
Probably anybody who collects anything would find 



186 OLD PEOPLE 

that it led to the same experiences. I believe col- 
lectors seldom suffer from ennui. My friend's 
other fad has been one of the main delights of her 
whole life. She has always had a garden, usually 
an extensive and beautiful one, and even in cir- 
cumstances so adverse as to have damped the 
ardor of most people, she has always kept it cred- 
itable. Anybody who creates beauty as the maker 
of a garden does contributes to the happiness of 
the world even when he is unaffectedly pursuing 
his own happiness. I have several old friends 
whose gardens are a blessing to the whole neigh- 
borhood. But my old lady past eighty cannot dig 
and weed as she once could. When she was fifty 
years old, trouble threatened to overwhelm her ; 
but she conquered it by going into her garden at 
four o'clock every morning, and digging, and 
weeding, and transplanting and watering, till from 
sheer fatigue she forgot the tragedy overhanging 
her life, and all the neighbors rejoiced in the beauty 
that bloomed before their eyes. Now she cannot do 
all this. But she does not give up her garden. She 
has a chair carried into the midst of it, and there she 
sits and directs another what to do. She has a little 



AFTER FOURSCORE 187 

hoe with a short handle which she can use herself 
from her chair, and so she succeeds in putting 
some finishing touches to the work herself. Last 
year the leading seedsman in the region made her 
heart swell with pride by declaring that while he 
had sold to other people many packages of as 
good seeds as he had sold to her, her flowers were 
the finest that had been produced from any of 
them. With her garden in the summer and her 
postage stamps in the winter, she says her time 
and thoughts are so occupied that she cannot be 
lonesome even if she must often be left alone. 
Of course neither a garden nor a stamp-album can 
fill the heart ; but her garden and stamp-album 
bring her into pleasant social relations with so 
many people that her heart, as well as her time 
and thoughts, is the fuller for them. " Everybody 
should have some fad," she declares with convic- 
tion. 

Some of our early fads fail us as we grow older. 
Many of my botanical friends grieve that some- 
thing of the zest of life is lost to them now that 
their eyes are too old for mosses and lichens, even 
with the help of the microscope. Others find a 



188 OLD PEOPLE 

compensation in the study of mushrooms, these 
being large enough to satisfy the needs of old 
eyes. Ornithologists find themselves heavily handi- 
capped when they can no longer hear the notes of 
the birds ; but sometimes they can attract their 
feathered friends about the door by scattering 
cracked nuts over the snow in winter, and so learn 
a new side of bird-life. Most old people have to 
exert their wits a little to find new occupations 
to take the place of those that are no longer within 
their reach. 

Gentle exercise is good for the old, and we never 
get beyond the need of play of some kind. Those 
who try to do without recreation do so at their 
peril: though, to be sure, what is recreation for 
one is not so for another. Some old people find 
whist an unfailing resource, especially if they have 
learned it thoroughly in youth. It does not require 
very good eyes, and it has the advantage of mak- 
ing one an acceptable companion to younger peo- 
ple. But a poor whist-player among connoisseurs 
— we all know that is a position requiring grace 
in all the parties. And perhaps it is hardly worth 
while to spend the years of youth needed to per- 



AFTER FOURSCORE 189 

feet one's self in the game for the sake of having 
that resource in age. A quiet game of cribbage 
with a friend is better for some of us. 

I asked an old lady of ninety-three the other 
day what amusements she could still enjoy. Her 
eyes sparkled as she answered, " Backgammon." 
She is a woman whose whole life has been earnest. 
I have heard that even as a young woman all her 
thoughts and occupations were serious, that her 
whole mind was bent on doing her duty. And she 
has done it well. When she was hardly more than 
a girl, she founded a school for girls such as was 
almost unknown in the country at that time. She 
has given money and thought and work to it all her 
life, and has stamped it with her own noble, up- 
right, unselfish character. Thousands of girls have 
owed the inspiration of their lives to her, directly 
or indirectly. She is a rich woman who has given 
thought to every dollar she has spent, mean- 
ing that it should bless the world. And her work 
still goes on. I do not mean simply that the insti- 
tutions she has fostered still flourish. They will 
flourish long after she has passed beyond our 
sight; but I mean that she still gives personal 



190 OLD PEOPLE 

attention to new projects, and decides whether to 
help them or not. She is by no means a drone in 
the hive. But she needs recreation, and she gets 
it from backgammon. 

Another old lady I know finds her recreation 
in dominoes. And some of my friends who, alas, 
must live alone, amuse themselves with solitaire. 
All such games are suited to old people. They do 
not require good eyes or good ears or strong hands ; 
they can be played with the most casual acquaint- 
ances. They rouse a gentle interest without excit- 
ing. They keep the mind busy without taxing it. 

Among my own aged relatives there have been 
several who passed their days in great satisfaction 
in reading novels. So far as my observation goes 
the people who read novels with interest in old 
age are those who have done a good deal of solid 
reading in their prime, and who are attracted by 
really good novels. I think the taste for trashy 
stories wears itself out long before fourscore. Fur- 
thermore, few persons find an abiding satisfaction 
in lifelike novels who have not a kindly interest 
in their fellow beings. Then when the infirmities 
of age shut them out from some of the social life 



AFTER FOURSCORE 191 

they love, they make silent friends with the delight- 
ful people of fiction. 

I have known one octogenarian who read all 
Shakespeare's plays through every year, and came 
at last to knowing them almost by heart. But he 
was one of those wonderful old men of whom we 
often hear but whom we seldom see, who at 
eighty-three could read the newspaper without 
glasses. It is said, to be sure, that the eyesight is 
sometimes recovered in extreme age, though such 
a recovery is often supposed to presage death. In 
the only instance I have personally known it was 
not so. A man of sixty- four, who had used glasses 
for a dozen or more years, suffered a terrible ill- 
ness. Erysipelas in the face was the disease, and 
it seemed for months that if he should live, he 
must inevitably be blind. Yet he recovered, and 
for the remaining twenty years of his life, he 
could read the finest print without glasses. It is 
always well to look at the future hopefully. I have 
known the hearing of a deaf old lady to improve 
surprisingly without any apparent cause. Another 
old lady of eighty-four, who has just lost her 
abundant hair from an illness, writes me that it 



192 OLD PEOPLE 

is coming in again beautifully, and adds that her 
grandfather cut a tooth after he was eighty, — 
the latter a doubtful blessing perhaps. 

After so long a digression, it may seem out of 
place to come back to the subject of loneliness in 
old age, but nevertheless, I cannot yet leave it. 
For even the bravest and most cheerful old peo- 
ple cannot always escape loneliness. At fourscore 
most of the friends of a lifetime have gone from 
our sight. We have not many contemporaries. We 
have learned by experience the truth we have al- 
ways been hearing, that the young cannot love 
the old as the old love the young. We see why 
this is so and why it is good that it should be so, 
and though, if we have ourselves a loving heart, 
we are not likely to be left without many good 
friends, the bravest of us must feel sometimes, 
like Wordsworth's old Matthew, — 

" Many love me : but by none 
Am I enough beloved." 

This is especially true of those who must live 
alone. It is not well to live alone. We all need 
the society of others not only for our happiness 
but for our character. The little unnoticed sacri- 



AFTER FOURSCORE 193 

fices that one is called upon to make every day, 
and even every hour, in a family, nourish the better 
life. It is hard to do without them. And yet it is 
sometimes necessary to live alone. A friend says 
emphatically, " I will never do that." She says she 
has watched one friend after another who has made 
the experiment, and that in every case, sooner or 
later, the mind has been warped. She says that 
sooner than do that, she would cast her own lot with 
any charitable institution that would accept her 
services, and work for others as best she could. 
I believe her theory is right. Without money she 
could not do that, and when she is old and feeble 
she might not be able to save herself from being a 
burden in a charitable institution. But a great 
many people find themselves left alone in their 
age, with just the little income that will keep them 
from want in their own homes, but with too little 
to allow them to give a home to a companion. It 
requires skill so to use their small property that 
they may be saved from the almshouse at last. 
This life is narrow and depressing. Many sink 
under it, but not all. 

I am thinking, for example, of an old man 



194 OLD PEOPLE 

whose wife died twenty years ago and left him 
alone in their neat little cottage. He did not choose 
to go to any of his married children, and has lived 
alone ever since. He does his own housework, and 
the cottage shines with cleanliness. He cultivates 
his garden. He does odd pieces of work for the 
neighbors, sets up stoves, and mows the lawns. 
He is a slender old man who looks as if a breath 
would blow him away ; but he is hale nevertheless, 
and keeps his sweet tenor voice so well that he is 
still an acceptable addition not only to the village 
choir, but to the choral union of the neighboring 
town, whither he goes by trolley one evening every 
week all winter to practice oratorios under a fa- 
mous leader. A daughter's family is not far away, 
and he has a host of cousins in the village. Once 
a week he recalls his old war experiences at the 
Grand Army Post. So you see he is not without 
congenial society. He does a thousand little kind- 
nesses for his neighbors, and helps the widow who 
lives next door in her business. He has reason 
to feel that his life is useful to others besides him- 
self. I am inclined to think he is quite as happy 
as if he were crowded into a corner in his daugh- 



AFTER FOURSCORE 195 

ter's home. His mind certainly continues alert at 
eighty, after all these lonely years. 

No two cases can be alike, and it sometimes 
happens that an old person can live the noblest 
life by withdrawing himself voluntarily from 
others. The mother of a family, for example, often 
has not strength enough to give both to her chil- 
dren and to her parents. The children need her 
most, and the parent who thoughtfully withdraws 
all claim to her attention, even though he sits 
alone all day, is contributing to the welfare of the 
family in the best way in his power. When a sac- 
rifice like this is made freely, prompted by a lov- 
ing heart, I do not believe that heart will corrode 
even in loneliness, and, in most cases, I believe 
in the end such love will be appreciated and re- 
turned. The willingness to withdraw when our 
company is really embarrassing to others is very 
rare. The discipline is painful, but nothing can 
be more wholesome than to learn humbly that 
sometimes we must be all alone. If we are willing 
to learn the lesson, we shall not be left with- 
out the help of our Unseen Friend. May not 
this experience of loneliness be one of the bless- 



196 OLD PEOPLE 

ings of old age, by bringing us nearer to that 
Friend? 



For some of the old a last grievous experience 
is waiting, — the mind fails in the end. How many 
of us pray to die before that time shall come ! 
But the prayer is not always answered. The reason 
such a fate should be permitted, and especially to 
any one who has used the mind nobly for a life- 
time, is so mysterious that faith falters in search- 
ing for it. The same question confronts us in 
insanity. In the greatest of other trials, we may 
say there is a blessing to those who bear them well; 
but how can we say this when the power to bear 
the trial is completely lost ? That such an afflic- 
tion sometimes brings out the noblest virtues in 
the friends of the sufferer is true; but what of the 
sufferer himself? Who can dare to answer such a 
question confidently ? And yet there is something 
I should like to say about it. Even in insanity the 
mind works sometimes toward moral ends, though 
the guiding power seems to be lost. My own ex- 
perience is very slight ; still, I have talked with 
some insane friends at moments when the cloud 



AFTER FOURSCORE 197 

half lifted, and it has seemed to me that I could 
catch a glimpse of the working of the spirit. The 
invalid can no longer make his life effective out- 
wardly ; he has lost control of himself, and yet a 
leaven seems to be working within him. He is so 
isolated from us that we cannot understand him ; 
but the experience may not be without meaning 
in his own development, even though, in case of 
his recovery, he may forget it. It is the brain, the 
instrument of the mind, that fails ; but the mind 
itself — is that lost ? What part has the mysteri- 
ous subconscious self to play in working out our 
final salvation ? If these questions press upon us 
in looking at the insane, they suggest themselves 
as surely when we watch the gradual failure of the 
mind of the old. The instrument of the mind is 
destroyed. Our dear one can no longer tell us of 
the half -formed thoughts brooding in that wasted 
brain. Because we cannot interpret them, are we 
sure they are not there? Watch the caterpillar 
growing more and more rigid and lifeless as it 
forms the chrysalis. We should call it dead, at last, 
if no one had ever seen a chrysalis burst. It is 
motionless for months. Are those months wasted ? 



198 OLD PEOPLE 

By no means, because in silence and apparent 
quiescence, the little creature is rearranging all 
its organs in preparation for a wonderful new life. 
The shell grows frailer and frailer, and when the 
splendid butterfly is fully formed, it is suddenly 
cast aside. Was the butterfly ready when the cat- 
erpillar curled itself up in a chrysalis ? No, indeed. 
Such an analogy proves nothing, of course ; yet it 
is suggestive. At least we need not bow our heads 
in despair and say it is impossible that there should 
be a wonderful and beautiful undercurrent in the 
life of our failing friend, pitiful as it is when looked 
at from the outside. We know so little of this 
great universe. Knowing so little, we must act 
according to the light we have, and do our best 
to preserve the health of the brain. Nourishing 
food, pure air, gentle exercise, keep the brain as 
well as the body in good condition. Holding our- 
selves aloof from our fellow creatures and brood- 
ing over our own troubles increase enormously any 
tendency to brain deterioration. Even in extreme 
age those who constantly interest themselves in 
new studies and scenes and occupations seem 
thereby to feed the brain and cause it to expand; 



AFTER FOURSCORE 199 

nothing seems to be so preservative of the mind 
as active love. And yet, the brain of even the most 
active lover of his kind may fail. We cannot avert 
the misfortune from ourselves or from those dear 
to us. If it falls upon those we love, let us bear 
with them so patiently and affectionately that we 
may learn from our own hearts that it will not be 
a misfortune without compensation if others should 
have to bear with us in the same way. 

Happily the loss of the mind is not very com- 
mon, even among those who live to a great age, 
and in most cases it does not last very long. We 
need not anticipate it. But let us believe what it 
is certainly most reasonable to believe : that even 
such an affliction carries with it a blessing. 



XIV 

THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 

In connection with Memorial Day, a veteran of 
the Civil War, addressing a schoolroom full of 
young people, who had grown up long after the 
close of the war, began his remarks with the 
words: "It is well that we should sometimes 
turn our minds to the past and renew our emo- 
tions." 

He was a man who had fought his battles for 
conscience' sake, and as he recalled the old experi- 
ences, his words thrilled his listeners. Because he 
renewed his own emotion, he was able to rouse a 
kindred noble feeling in those about him. 

It is rather the fashion to preach that we should 
always keep our faces turned to the future. Now, 
why do we think it is a virtue to look toward the 
future rather than toward the past ? It is the atti- 
tude of hope, and perhaps of help. In looking 
toward the past, the attitude is often that of re- 
gret ; but it is not always so. It is never so when 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 201 

we use the past to help us in the present, or if we 
love the past for what was best in it. 

The old are accused of dwelling too much in 
the past. Of course it is always delightful to see 
old people follow the injunction 

H Act, act in the living Present, 
Heart within and God o'erhead " ; 

and if we are to do this, it is no doubt necessary 
to obey the previous injunction of the poet, and 

" Let the dead Past bury its dead " ; 

but when we renew any noble emotion, we are deal- 
ing with the living, not the dead, Past, and if the 
emotion has ever borne fruit in us, it has become the 
strongest possible incentive for acting in the living 
Present. I believe that the quiet years when old peo- 
ple are thinking over their past have a great part 
to play in the unfolding of the character — for the 
character is never finished even if we live to be a 
hundred. Of course, if we think of the past simply 
as a series of incidents, the thought is of no more 
use to us than counting a billion would be ; but 
when we recall its emotions, if our life has been 
worthy, we are often filled with a tenderness and 



202 OLD PEOPLE 

a heroism which renews our present life, and makes 
us still a power to inspire others to do what we 
may be too weak to do ourselves. We often hear 
it said that some old person is greatly softened by 
age. A grandmother, sitting quietly in a corner, 
remembers her childish grief over an unsympa- 
thetic word. She remembers, too, that in the stress 
of middle life she sometimes spoke sharply to her 
own children. Her heart melts, and she has only 
the sweetest words for her grandchildren. She is 
not afraid of spoiling them ; she remembers so 
keenly when others spoke too harshly to her, and 
when she herself spoke too harshly to others, and 
it is well that she remembers these things. 

The man who honestly sacrificed all his hopes 
and ambitions in 1861, because he really believed 
that laying down his life might help to deliver a 
race from bondage, cannot remember such a con- 
secration of himself and be willing, forty years 
later, to exploit the Filipinos for his own aggran- 
dizement. The past emotion binds him to spend 
the strength still left him in blessing. 

Some of my friends burn every letter as soon as 
it is answered, no matter how full it is of love and 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 203 

tenderness. Perhaps it is the only way to do, i£ 
you would not have a houseful of old letters that 
you have not the heart to burn, and that may be 
carelessly handled by those who come after you. 
Yet I know old people, left much alone, who pass 
happy hours in reading over letters that meant 
everything to them fifty years ago, and who find 
in the renewal of the old emotion a guarantee 
that love does not die, and that old friends are 
waiting for them just beyond the veil with hearts 
as full of the old love as they know their own 
to be. 

An old lady tells me that it has recently fallen 
to her lot to look over and burn hundreds of 
old sermons. Her father was a minister, and at 
his death, the family had not the heart to burn 
unread the sermons he had worked over so faith- 
fully ; so they lay for several decades untouched. 
Now his daughter is the last of her family. She 
could not leave the sermons to fall into careless 
hands, and she could not bear to make a general bon- 
fire of them, though she knew they were not great 
sermons, and she believed their work was done. 
She felt that she must look them over and reserve 



204 OLD PEOPLE 

a very few that would recall her father most 
vividly to her. And so she began to examine them. 
She says that it was as if her whole early life rose 
up before her. She came upon texts that she re- 
membered as a little girl ; she saw her father stand- 
ing before her in the pulpit, and heard his earnest 
voice. Perhaps she remembered little of the ser- 
moiij but the text recalled the old emotion, the 
resolve to follow the blessed life her father was 
trying to point out. She came to sermons that 
she remembered to have been preached in crises 
of the family life, and she read them with an al- 
most passionate interest because of the unseen 
writing between the lines. She recalled the thrill 
of her girlhood when, the morning after a disas- 
trous fire, the church being full of people who felt 
themselves to be ruined, her father rose and read, 
in a firm voice, the text, " And again I say, Ke- 
joice." Even if she could not now look back on 
the forty years of prosperity to the principal suf- 
ferers that followed the fire, — and were in a cer- 
tain sense due to it, for the fire caused manufac- 
turers to make desirable changes in their business, 
— even if the disaster had proved as irreparable 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 205 

as it then seemed, she could never forget the cour- 
age that swelled in her heart when her father 
called on all his hearers to meet the calamity 
bravely, trusting in the Providence that afflicts 
only to bless. There are clouds about her life 
now that, it seems, will never lift. But when she 
read the old text, she says, her spirit rose to meet 
any trouble. 

There was the sermon on Slavery that set her 
heart beating with sympathy for the oppressed, 
the sermon after the firing on Sumter, the one 
after the dreadful news from Bull Run, the hope- 
ful one after the Emancipation Proclamation, the 
sorrowing one after the death of Lincoln, the one 
of thanksgiving for the return of peace. She says 
she felt, as she read, that no country in which the 
emotions roused by such sermons were common to 
the masses of people, as she knew they had been, 
could soon lose such an inspiration. She found her- 
self readier to say, " Greifan, mit Gott" in meet- 
ing the perplexing and discouraging questions of 
the new century. Too old and feeble to hope to 
do much to stem the tide of evils that sometimes 
seemed to her to advance with formidable force, as 



206 OLD PEOPLE 

she read the daily papers, still, how could she be 
a pessimist when the renewal of the old emotions 
sent the blood bounding again through her heart? 
The sermons had to be burned in the end, but they 
had not lain idle a quarter of a century in vain. 

She says, in speaking of this experience, that it 
was unique in another way. It taught her to enter 
into her father's life as, with all her love for him, 
she had never done before. Though he had de- 
stroyed thousands of his old sermons himself, yet 
there were some left belonging to his earliest min- 
istry. There were even essays at sermons in an 
almost boyish hand, written when he was in the 
Theological Seminary, with here and there a He- 
brew phrase that showed how his new study was 
putting a new meaning into the old texts. There 
was his ordination sermon, his first sermon when 
he was settled in his first parish. His daughter 
found herself living over with him his fresh young 
life, and rejoicing in realizing its high ideals, fol- 
lowed so faithfully in the years she could remem- 
ber herself. 

Among the sermons were a few other treasures 
that brought the tears to her eyes. I will speak of 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 207 

only one. It was a boy's lecture on Paris, written 
more than three quarters of a century ago, when Na- 
poleon was still wearing out his life on St. Helena. 
The lady knew the history of this lecture. Though 
her father lived in a small farming town where 
even now there is no railroad, and where mails 
were received only once a week, there was abun- 
dant intellectual energy there, and the boys of the 
town determined to give a course of lectures of 
their own. And so her father set himself to study 
Paris. He had no guidebooks, he had no encyclo- 
paedias, and nobody in those days had any photo- 
graphs. But he was enterprising. He succeeded 
in getting some cuts of public buildings, and then, 
on large sheets of brown paper he copied them in 
ink, so that he gave a bona fide illustrated lecture 
long before the stereopticon was invented. He 
searched the newspapers and such books as could 
be found at home and among his neighbors for 
materials for his description of Paris, and though 
his months of labor could not teach him as much 
about the city as an hour in its streets would have 
done, who shall say that his townspeople were not 
the wiser for the boy's work ? His daughter could 



208 OLD PEOPLE 

not burn those neat pen-and-ink drawings on 
brown paper, and she says that the thought of that 
boy, toiling over his self-imposed task so long ago, 
gives her new respect for the possibilities in every 
boy she sees now. 

It is no light blessing that in studying rev- 
erently the relics of the immediate past, we are so 
often taught to know and love our parents more 
tenderly. Children love their parents, but few un- 
derstand them. That they can learn to understand 
them more and more fully after their living com- 
panionship is over, is a gage of immortality. It 
shows us possibilities of a transcendent life, of a 
perfecting of the germs of love that we know 
here. Its suggestions are unspeakable. 

Sometimes the reverence old people pay to the 
memory of their own kindred takes a curiously 
pathetic and even abnormal form. For example, 
I knew a mother and daughter who were often at 
variance. The daughter, whose taste was some- 
what more cultivated than the mother's, was con- 
stantly wishing to make changes in the furnish- 
ings of the house, and this the mother resisted. 
The mother died, and the daughter was free to do 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 209 

as she chose. And then, lo ! she seemed com- 
pletely metamorphosed. So far from wishing to 
make any of the changes she had so long advo- 
cated, the study of her life was to preserve every- 
thing precisely as her mother left it. This may 
have been due to the tardy prickings of conscience ; 
but perhaps it was because the tenderness newly 
welling up in her heart, as she thought of her who 
was gone, made the home her mother had planned 
so dear to her that it seemed more beautiful than 
any dwelling arranged according to her own fancy. 
She should have felt the tenderness while her 
mother lived, and have avoided those little bick- 
erings. Then perhaps she would not have been 
so unwilling to make the changes she had wished 
for, changes that would certainly have made her 
home more beautiful both for herself and for 
other people. And yet who knows? It is said 
that Ruskin's house was full of incongruous 
furnishings, because he would not part with any 
of the ugly old furniture associated with his par- 
ents, though he had exquisite taste when selecting 
for himself. And who would not feel his house 
to be more beautiful because he did preserve the 



210 OLD PEOPLE 

associations ? If the mission of outward beauty is 
to nourish inward beauty, if the material form is 
given simply to suggest the soul, then the most 
suggestive furnishings are the most beautiful. 

I am not of those who scour the country for 
old furniture, old books, and old china. Why 
should I want an ugly piece of crockery simply 
because it is old ? But my own grandmother's old 
china and silver, and the little books of French 
exercises written in her neat girlish hand, or the 
ponderous calf -bound editions of Virgil and Homer 
that my own grandfather read in college have a 
meaning to me far beyond their intrinsic worth. 
They renew emotion, and the older we grow, the 
more we need to have emotion renewed within us. 

A wholesome way to renew emotion is to share 
it with a child. The comradeship of little children 
with their grandfathers and grandmothers is pro- 
verbial. The famous friendship of Sir Walter Scott 
and little Johnny Lockhart is not essentially differ- 
ent from thousands and thousands of such friend- 
ships that are unrecorded. The childlike spirit in 
the old that makes such comradeship natural is 
not the result of "second childhood," though it 



THE RENEWAL OF EMOTION 211 

sometimes appears in that distorted form, but it 
comes from a renewal of the early emotions of 
life through love for the little child. It is good 
for both that the old should tell the story of their 
lives to the young, — in fragmentary anecdotes, 
of course, for no one sits down deliberately to tell 
the whole tale, — and that the young should listen 
to it. It enriches the emotional life of both. 

I have seen those in whom the enthusiasm for 
nature had begun to wane with failing senses 
glow with all the old spirit in taking a walk 
through the woods with a child. The child, with 
its sharp eyes, finds the flowers and the lichens 
and the minerals and the chrysalids, and with its 
sharp ears hears the music of the birds, the chat- 
tering of the squirrels and the hum of the insects ; 
and, in answering the child's questions, the years 
roll away, and the delight of youth comes back. 
Just this reminder of what the outside world used 
to be is needed to revivify the dim vision and the 
dull ears. 

We would not "burn in the socket" with 
" hearts as dry as summer dust." Bitter suffering 
would be better than that. 



212 OLD PEOPLE 

If the emotion is abnormal and fetters us to the 
past, let us put it away from us. But if it rouses 
the love within us that leads us forward freely 
into the boundless future, let us cherish it. 

Who would be like the Haunted Man of Dick- 
ens ? He prayed to lose the memory of grief and 
wrong. He thought he could keep the best of 
his life when he had forgotten his pain. And 
when his prayer was granted, all tenderness was 
withered in his heart, and he no longer knew how 
to help his fellow men. With him, let us pray the 
prayer he learned to pray at last: "Lord, keep 
my memory green." 



XV 

A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 

Who ever read without a shudder Thackeray's 
remark, " Aged people are seldom capable of bear- 
ing friendship/ ' or without determining within 
himself that it should not be true in his own case ? 
We all know hundreds of warm friendships 
among the old. Did not Scott find the Ladies of 
Llangollen, old and stout and prosaic, as devoted 
to each other as when they were young and beau- 
tiful and romantic at the time Madame de Genlis 
describes them ? Indeed, the opinion is general that 
old friendships are dearer than new, and that they 
grow dearer to the end. Has Thackeray's merci- 
less scalpel laid bare the truth about a cherished 
fallacy ? Was Charles Lamb thinking more ten- 
derly of the same thing when he wrote, — 

" And some they have died, and some they have left us, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces " ? 

Let us tell the truth at any rate. Everybody 
knows that the old seldom have strength to make 



214 OLD PEOPLE 

new friends, though there are beautiful excep- 
tions even to this rule. It is a great quality in 
character — the power of making new friends in 
old age, and only a rare nature can he a new friend 
to an old person. 

But do the old friendships grow cold ? 

Friendship is woven of many threads. Those 
people who are even moderately young, and who 
have the capacity to enjoy many things together, 
hardly stop to ask whether a friend is congenial or 
not. Any acquaintance who does not actually jar 
upon us we accept as ours. If we can ride and drive 
and row and dance and play tennis and enjoy the 
opera with a vigorous, well-dressed companion who 
is good-natured and tells the truth, and has no dis- 
agreeable personal habits, we think we have found 
a friend. We are sincere, and believe ourselves far 
above making merely " fair-weather friends." 

Every misfortune tests friendship. Life always 
sifts our friends. A loss of money or a loss of 
health will separate us from many we had thought 
we could count on, even though they may not be 
consciously self-seekers. Most of our acquaintances 
will still come to call on us, even if our home is 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 215 

humbler than it used to be, or if our sick room is 
a dull place ; their self-respect brings them, as well 
as a good-natured sympathy, but the spring of their 
interest in us is often broken, and the acquaint- 
ance languishes when we can no longer enjoy the 
same pursuits together. Perhaps no one is much 
to blame. The fact is, we were never friends, 
though we had supposed we were. But the real 
friends, who have endured the many tests of life, 
find a new test awaiting them in old age, one of 
the severest of all. 

Some one says to me that the reason travel- 
ing is such a test of friendship is because we are 
all tired at once, and that explains the strain that 
sometimes comes to two old friends who have cheer- 
fully borne the burden and the heat of the day 
together. In the past, if one fainted, the other was 
at hand to give him the efficient care he needed 
and to love him all the better for the service. But 
when both faint at once, who is to restore them ? 
Old people who live with the young do not have 
this kind of strain ; but on the other hand they 
are never able to keep pace with their companions, 
so that these friendships are necessarily of a dif- 



216 OLD PEOPLE 

ferent fibre from those of contemporaries. One 
who has proved herself the stanchest of friends 
to many different men and women through all the 
trying vicissitudes of their lives, and through great 
weakness and misfortune of her own, once gave 
me her version of the pain that seems almost inevi- 
table at some time or other in the relations of close 
friends, however noble. " We lean upon another 
with perfect confidence/' she said, " and then, at 
some crisis in our lives, we find that we must lean 
more heavily. The other, who has always been glad 
to bear our weight, has borne all he had strength 
for before. The new weight prostrates him, and 
we become suddenly aware that we have leaned 
too heavily." Here is a test that proves the finest 
natures. 

I have lately seen a letter written by a delicate 
woman who has upheld another — a helpless in- 
valid — for half a lifetime, who has given her a 
home, care in illness, sympathy in good report 
and evil report, and who has seen that the inva- 
lid's dainty tastes were all satisfied. To do this she 
has had to overcome obstacles before which most 
of us would have quailed. Now she has herself 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 217 

been dangerously ill, and only the most perfect 
quiet will save her from such a wreck as will make 
the rest of her life a burden to herself and pre- 
vent her being anything to a large circle of friends 
who count upon her for the best in their lives. 
She writes : " I went from the ordeal in New York 
to find Elizabeth terribly ill in X. ; I had to turn 
from her, — it was my only chance, — but I left a 
good caretaker with her. It is still doubtful if she 
can rally. . . . Poor, poor Elizabeth! I always 
thought she would have me to rely on while I lived." 
She has had to turn from the poor Elizabeth. She 
had no choice; but can the dying woman, missing 
the only friend she has at this supreme moment, 
quite understand that her friend has not failed? 

To the old such tests of friendship often come. 
Even when the friendship is real, when the friends 
love each other sincerely, there is often — perhaps 
usually — a temporary but very painful slacken- 
ing of friendship as both friends become physically 
unable to fulfill the expectations their bond in the 
past implies. Friendship cannot mean exactly the 
same to the old as to the young. It is both less and 
more. 



218 OLD PEOPLE 

Half friendship, as I have said, consists in en- 
joying things together. A lady says to me : " I 
like to do things with others." And this lady has 
done delightful things with her special friend. 
She has been with her to all the first views of the 
art exhibitions and to hear all the good music in 
Boston for many years past. The two have trav- 
eled all over Europe together. They have made 
excursions constantly in company. They have de- 
lighted in going to church together. They have 
worked thoughtfully and generously together in 
their charities. I cannot believe that their friend- 
ship will ever wane. But if one of them should 
become blind, they could no longer enjoy first 
views together, and if the hearing of the other 
should fail, what companionship could they enjoy 
at a symphony concert ? Half the congeniality of 
these friends comes from their power to see the 
same beauty in pictures and to hear the same har- 
monies in music. Such similar tastes would seem 
to be a worthy foundation for their friendship. 
And yet if it has no deeper foundation, it may 
be swept away. If the friends are merely good 
comrades, what will be left to them when one can 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 219 

no longer see pictures and the other can no longer 
hear symphonies ? And however deep the founda- 
tion, will it not be severely tested ? Can two peo- 
ple always talk of the past, even if its crowning 
glory has been that they have enjoyed it together? 
Can they always talk of the inner life, even when 
the truest life of both is within ? The body is the 
organ through which, in this world at least, the 
soul expresses itself ; and when the body fails, how 
can the soul assert itself ? And with the old, the 
body always does fail. 

In supposing one of two friends to become 
blind and the other deaf, I have taken an extreme 
case, in order to state the question fully. But 
while few become totally blind or stone-deaf, with 
almost all old people both the eyes and ears grow 
dull and the strength fails. Now suppose that 
two friends both love pictures and music, and are 
in the habit of enjoying them together, but that 
one cares more for pictures and the other more 
for music. So long as both are strong, they help 
each other, and through mutual education, they 
draw nearer and nearer together. Then come 
their days of weakness, and there is a crisis in their 



OLD PEOPLE 

friendship. Shall they go to the Art Club in the 
afternoon and to the Symphony in the evening, 
as of old ? Neither has the strength to do so much. 
One would choose the pictures, but the other 
longs for the music. Nothing can be easier at 
first than for each to yield to the other. But the 
calls for self-sacrifice become constant. One has 
such weak eyes that she can never look at pictures 
with any pleasure ; the other misses so many notes 
in the music that the harmony becomes chaos. 
The sacrifices one makes for the other are fruit- 
less. What pleasure can it give me to have you 
go to an art exhibition with me, if I know your 
eyes are aching? What pleasure can it be to you 
to have me sit beside you at a concert when you 
know that not one melody reaches my brain ? And 
so the ways divide. One goes to the exhibition 
and one goes to the concert, — unless, indeed, they 
both stay stupidly at home, — and each tries in 
some imperfect fashion to tell the other what she 
has seen or heard; but they are no more com- 
rades. 

" I am sorry for my cousin," a lady said. " His 
love for nature is a passion, but for years he has 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 221 

hardly had a tramp in the woods because his wife 
is an invalid. When he is ready to start, she is 
sure to have an attack of illness. I have seen him 
turn back a hundred times tenderly, without an 
impatient word, just as he was about to set off as 
full of glee as a boy." Of course he was right to 
turn back. There is something sweeter in minister- 
ing to an invalid we love than the most passionate 
lover of nature can find in a woodland walk. If 
any one doubts it, let him read the love-letters of 
the Brownings. But then, we must really love the 
invalid, and I think, too, that the invalid must be 
worth loving. I should have very little faith in 
an invalid who, seeing her husband preparing for 
a woodland tramp, did not try her best to keep 
back her groans till he was fairly out of the 
house. 

I fancy that at the point where physical weak- 
ness destroys comradeship men who are friends 
often drop each other ; that is, they meet on the 
common ground still left to them, but make little 
effort to keep up the old habits. As Thackeray says, 
they are not " capable of bearing friendship," 
and they meet their fate without many words. 



222 



OLD PEOPLE 



But women are more emotional, and they do not 
yield so easily, — that is, if they really love each 
other: for simple comrades always part company 
here. They try to live the old life, but they have 
not the strength for it. And then one says a tired 
word that sounds like a sharp word, and the other 
replies with another tired word that sounds still 
sharper, and there is a " little rift within the 
lute," and their nerves are henceforth on edge 
whenever they meet. Each begins to wonder if 
the other may not be really a little to blame that 
the sources of mutual pleasure have been cut off, 
and the fabric of a friendship whose foundations 
had seemed like those of the everlasting hills 
begin to totter. The worst of all their suffering 
is that each doubts her friend. We realize that 
our parents are old, and are considerate of them ; 
but it is harder to realize that one of our con- 
temporaries has lost some power that we our- 
selves still possess. Sometimes a friendship is thus 
destroyed completely. But with women of noble 
nature, love is stronger than suspicion, and the 
painful crisis passes. At last the winter is over, 
and the friendship blossoms again, all the more 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 223 

beautifully because it has borne the test of the 
frosts that could not kill it. 

Love is something higher than the power to en- 
joy together the beauty of the woods, or of music, 
or of painting ; still, when the two who have en- 
joyed the outer world together can no longer do 
so, the inner world is sometimes also almost rent 
asunder, and alas for those whose outer life has 
never been the expression of an inner spiritual 
life. Alas for those who have enjoyed pleasures 
together, but who have never worked heartily to- 
gether to bless somebody besides themselves. 

When, for any reason, we become a physical 
burden to our dearest, a still severer test is applied 
that can be borne only by the most perfect friend- 
ship. In reading Browning's life, I have often been 
struck, not only by his tremendous power of lov- 
ing, but by his power to be an enthusiastic friend 
to many who must have been a physical strain to 
him. He was hale to fourscore, to be sure, and yet 
he had years of semi-invalidism from which he 
seems to have been almost emancipated by his love 
for his wife, as she in her turn was raised from a 
living grave by the intensity of her affection for 



224 OLD PEOPLE 

him. Such a man as Browning shows us in the 
twinkling of an eye that Thackeray's dictum of 
old age and friendship, though it might be the 
result of keen observation, was not made in one 
of his moments of insight; and when we have faced 
all the dismal facts about old age that I have felt 
bound to set down in this chapter, we are still un- 
daunted, knowing that true friendship is immor- 
tal, and that when all selfishness has been strained 
out of our lives, we shall be free to enjoy it. Sac- 
rifices are called for, and glad we are to make them. 
Without the sacrifices, we could never have guessed 
what friendship really is. We can even accept with 
enthusiasm the sacrifices made for us, because of 
the exquisite delight of seeing the full beauty of 
our friend's spirit. 

I have seen physical loss that seemed to threaten 
the disruption of a friendship serve in the end to 
bind the friends more closely together. One friend 
became deaf. The other ignored the deafness. She 
asserted that she did not even perceive it. How 
should she when she held her afflicted friend so 
close to her that even the lowest of her clear tones 
could be distinctly heard? But the deafness in- 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 225 

creased, till even a trumpet was of little use, 
and the unselfish friend lost her voice. The Fates 
seemed to conspire to separate them. But she who 
could not speak would not own herself vanquished. 
She wrote what she wanted to say, and she wrote 
so fully and freely that the communication between 
the two hardly seemed interrupted. But such an 
effort prostrated her. Both friends were old, and 
neither had the strength necessary to use the lip 
language. One had eyes too weak to learn it. The 
other was too frail to make the effort necessary 
for clear enunciation. The physical obstacles on 
both sides were too great to be overcome. Often 
and often the friends were too feeble to meet. Yet 
when they met there was a sparkle of the eye 
and a radiance in the smile that told them both 
that the old enthusiasm of their friendship still 
blazed at its brightest. 

There are no verses in literature more touching 
than Cowper's, beginning 

" The twentieth year is well-nigh past," 

written to Mrs. Unwin when her powers were 
almost exhausted : — 



226 OLD PEOPLE 

" Thy indistinct expressions seem 
Like language uttered in a dream ; 
Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme, 
My Mary ! 



" Partakers of thy sad decline, 
Thy hands their little force resign ; 
Yet, gently prest, press gently mine, 
My Mary ! 

" Such feebleness of limbs thou prov'st 
That now at every step thou mov'st 
Upheld by two ; yet still thou lov'st, 
My Mary ! 

" And still to love, though prest with ill, 
In wintry age to feel no chill, 
With me is to be lovely still, 
My Mary!" 

Cowper had that saddest of all experiences, the 
knowledge that his friend, whose love was so per- 
fect, was broken through his own mental malady. 

" And should my future lot be cast 
With much resemblance of the past, 
Thy worn-out heart will break at last, 
My Mary ! " 



A LAST LESSON IN FRIENDSHIP 227 

The friendship that endures through insanity on 
the one side and complete bodily exhaustion on 
the other must have its roots in eternity. 

It must be that what we believe to be friend- 
ship must often fail with the body, because we 
have to learn the great lesson that though the 
body is the necessary instrument of the soul in 
this world, it is only an instrument. How far does 
the body rule us ? This is the question we are 
forced to ask ourselves when a trusted friendship 
crumbles. But a true friendship outrides the storm, 
and the old know heights and depths in friend- 
ship, hidden from the young. Love increases with 
age, not only because of the wonderful background 
of loving memories, becoming richer every year, 
but because it has been nourished by countless sac- 
rifices in the past. For these reasons the love of old 
married people is something unspeakably tender. 

" John Anderson my jo, John, 
We clamb the hill thegither" 

But even the marriage bond is sometimes bro- 
ken ; and for those who are simply friends, it is 
far easier to snap the bond when it begins to chafe. 



228 OLD PEOPLE 

When we feel the strain, when the test of friend- 
ship is applied, how shall we meet it ? We think 
our friend is failing us. How shall we be sure not 
to fail ourselves ? For our own disabilities, let us 
bear them as lightly and cheerfully as possible, 
and for the rest — my dear friend says, " Speak 
always to the friend that may be." When we do 
that, our last lesson in friendship will be learned. 



XVI 

LAST LESSONS IN CHARACTER 

While some characters grow more and more beau- 
tiful to the end of life, this is not true of all. 
Most of us have been saddened by seeing cases of 
deterioration in old people, even among those who 
have followed high ideals all their lives. There are 
certain faults, too, that seem to belong peculiarly 
to old age. What does this mean ? 

Often the deterioration is due entirely to physical 
causes. The mind and body are so bound together 
that when either begins to fail, the other also wanes. 
The failure in character is often the result of dis- 
ease of the brain even when this is not marked 
enough to be clearly recognized, and in passing 
judgment on any given case, we must always allow 
for this possibility and judge kindly. How far 
another is responsible for failure we can never 
know ; perhaps we cannot even know how far we 
are responsible for our own failures : yet we are 
conscious sometimes, in our own case, that there is 
responsibility. 



230 OLD PEOPLE 

One form of deterioration is suggested by a 
friend, who asks, " Why is it that those who have 
fought against some fault all their lives so often 
seem to be mastered by it in their old age ? " 

Another friend answers, "Because they have 
not really learned their lesson. For example/' she 
says, " a boy who has not conquered the first book 
in geometry, however hard he may have studied, 
will find himself in deep water when he has to 
apply its principles in the second book." 

No doubt this is the true explanation in many 
cases. The lesson had seemed to be learned when 
life was fresh and vigorous, but it was not so thor- 
oughly learned that it could be applied when the 
body was feeble and the old props were removed. 

But even when the first book has been made our 
own, the second book may have difficulties that 
will stagger us. In a discussion of character, we 
may leave out of account people who are irrespon- 
sible through disease of the brain ; but there are 
various degrees of responsibility, and it certainly 
seems as if the lessons set some scholars are harder 
than those of others. 

I do not remember any other example in litera- 



LAST LESSONS IN CHARACTER 231 

ture to be compared with the powerful delineation 
which Thackeray has given us of the old age of 
Colonel Newcome. Though it is fiction, yet it is 
the fiction of a master who understood humanity 
so well that it is worth as serious study as if Colonel 
Newcome had lived in the flesh. Brave, generous, af- 
fectionate, modest, as ready to ask forgiveness as to 
grant it, this man met trial after trial all through 
his life, and his character came out of the furnace 
shining always brighter and brighter. And then, 
toward the last, there is a change. He has lost all 
his money when he is too old to earn more. He has 
carried down his friends in his fall. His only child, 
his splendid Give, has made a wretched marriage, 
and the mother-in-law drives both Clive and his 
father almost mad with her petty tyranny. Then 
the colonel loses the old sweetness of temper. He 
becomes revengeful towards his nephew Barnes, 
who certainly richly deserved any punishment: 
only we do not like to think of our gentle colo- 
nel administering it. More than that, he is dis- 
satisfied with the poor, harassed Clive himself, 
and angry with his dearly loved Ethel, who, what- 
ever her faults in the past, is now at her very best, 



232 OLD PEOPLE 

and trying to help him. What does this all mean? 
It means that though he has mastered the first 
book, — and in his case, let us say the second book 
also, — yet the third book is very hard. He is be- 
ing tried in a hotter furnace than any in which 
he has suffered before. But Thackeray is right in 
making him triumph in the end. He dies in an 
almshouse, to be sure, but he does not die with 
revenge and anger in his heart. He had seemed 
to be humble always; but it was not till the very 
end that he was made perfect in humility. 

Real humility is one of the hardest lessons in 
the whole great book of life, and it is this lesson 
that is set for almost all people who live to be old. 

There are various minor faults that often appear 
in old age, such as want of neatness, undue curi- 
osity, and lack of interest in life ; and these, per- 
haps, are not of very much importance, — except, 
indeed, as the loss of interest in life shows that we 
are less unselfishly alive to the welfare of others 
than we should wish to be when we have nothing 
to look forward to for ourselves. But it seems to 
me that most of the serious faults we observe in 
the old have their foundation in the fact that so 



LAST LESSONS IN CHARACTER 233 

difficult a lesson as humility has been set for 
this period of life. 

It is inevitable that the old should have to bear 
neglect, or, rather, what seems neglect to them. 
They think the young neglect them. But a young 
person who should give an old person constant 
devotion would make a complete sacrifice of life, 
and not always to the best end. Of course there 
must be sacrifices ; but I love to see the brave, un- 
selfish old men and women who send their chil- 
dren and grandchildren out on pleasure trips as 
often as they possibly can, while they pass their dull 
hours alone. They cannot keep the pace of the 
young. They acknowledge it humbly, and do not 
choose to tie the young to their crutches. 

But the old are neglected even by their con- 
temporaries. At least, your friend, who is feeble 
himself, cannot come to see you when you are too 
feeble to go to him. Why should you fancy that 
you are neglected, even though you are left alone ? 
There is a reason for it. Sometimes, it is true, the 
reason is the mortifying one, that with the failure 
of your powers you have less to give than of old, 
and so others are not attracted toward you. You 



234 OLD PEOPLE 

acknowledge the fact, and you do not want any- 
body to come to see you simply for pity's sake ; 
yet the acknowledgment is bitter. You did not 
think your last lesson was going to be so hard to 
learn. 

I once heard a preacher say that a priest who 
had heard thousands of confessions declared that 
among them all, no one had ever confessed to the 
sin of envy. A discussion that followed the re- 
mark developed the fact that not one of the au- 
dience believed himself guilty of this sin. Yet I 
once heard a noble and sweet old lady say, almost 
under her breath, but with an air of absolute con- 
viction, " I envy people." She was suffering from 
great stress of circumstances. She was poor and 
ill and did not know where to turn. It seemed 
unjust that she should be in such need, for her 
life had been spent in patient work that every- 
body acknowledged to be of the highest value, and 
yet it had not received the payment that is given 
to much that is inferior. No trace of envy ever 
appeared in her manner toward the lucky inferiors ; 
but she acknowledged the fault, and so, I suppose, 
she was well on the way to amend it. 



LAST LESSONS IN CHARACTER 235 

I have often had occasion to wonder if envy is 
not a rather common fault among the old. When 
you are young and strong and feel that the world 
is before you, it is easy to be magnanimous. Your 
friend has gained a prize. Very well. You rejoice 
with him. Even when it is a prize you had hoped 
to gain yourself, still, you say generously that 
there are other prizes waiting for you, and you do 
not grudge him his success. But when your day 
of work is over and you have nothing more to 
hope for, when you may not even try for any- 
thing more, when you think how little of what 
you hoped to do you have actually accomplished, 
then it is somewhat hard to say, — 

" Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong, 
Finish what I begin 
And what I fail of, win." 

Perhaps it is true that you have accomplished 
some things, while others have accomplished some 
other things, and yet you meant to do every- 
thing yourself, — and now the day is over. 

It takes a very large heart not to be envious 
when you are old. And when you have conquered 



236 OLD PEOPLE 

envy, you have nearly learned the last lesson o£ 
life. Dante makes pride a still deadlier sin than 
envy, and until pride is altogether subdued, we 
have not fully learned our last lesson. Now, in 
old age, comes the fiercest struggle with pride. 
Whatever the achievements of the past, however 
rich and great and honored we may be, nothing 
can satisfy a proud spirit but a continuance of 
personal power ; and when we know that we are 
weak and helpless, we realize that the hottest in- 
ward battle of our lives is before us. Sometimes, 
indeed, we hardly know how to vanquish all pride 
without destroying something of true self-respect. 

Why are these terrible lessons given us just at 
the end ? For the same reason that the most dif- 
ficult courses of study are set for the senior year 
in college. Those who have done all the previous 
work well can do this work too, addressing them- 
selves to it with the calmness and patience that 
has become a habit through long exercise. But it 
is not easy for the most diligent. 

Why are such lessons needed ? Because the 
best in us is never fully developed till we have 
been tested at every point. We long to be our 



LAST LESSONS IN CHARACTER 237 

best. There is nothing we long for so much. And 
shall we shrink from the training that helps us 
to be our best ? We do shrink. It is only those 
whose life has been spent in steadily facing the 
enemy who have the courage not to shrink from 
these last tests. Most of us have been poltroons 
sometimes in our lives, and so we feel the twinge 
of cowardice at the last. But let us at least remem- 
ber that the lessons are needed, that we cannot be 
fit for the higher life we long for without them, 
and however our heart may sink, let us set about 
our task. 

That these lessons are given us just at the time 
when all true life seems to us to be over, carries 
with it a real inspiration. It means that we are at 
the beginning of a new life when we had stupidly 
fancied that there was nothing for us but the end. 
It is a promise of immortality. What seems like 
a sentence of death when the powers so fail that 
we no longer have "a point of pride" left to us, is 
simply a call to a fuller life, when, through hu- 
mility, we have lost our little selves in the great 
Life of the universe. 



XVII 

PRIVILEGES 

The old have their own privileges. When we dwell 
on their disabilities, we paint a sombre picture ; but 
in real life we find, I think, as many happy faces 
among the old as among the young, and more than 
among the middle-aged, who set their teeth as 
they grapple with the anxieties that surround them. 

" Old people are always taken care of," a hard 
worker says grimly. " Everybody knows they can- 
not work. I should like to found a hospital for 
the middle-aged." 

Well, both the work and the rest belong to life, 
and it is a satisfaction to the old to feel that the 
time for rest has come, a sweeter satisfaction to 
those who have earned the rest by faithful work 
than to others. For one who is tired out, it is de- 
lightful not to be expected to work, even to know 
that it is impossible to work, since, if possible, it 
would usually be absolutely necessary. It is de- 
lightful to know that you cannot keep up with 



PRIVILEGES 239 

the times, and that therefore you need not try, 
that you need not harass yourself further in the 
endeavor to find a becoming bonnet, since you 
will not have occasion to wear one, that you may 
be as old-fashioned as you please and that every- 
body will forgive you. Thackeray wrote a charm- 
ing paper On the Pleasures of being a Fogy, and 
many old people echo his sentiments. 

If the old cannot have as many pleasures as 
they once had, at all events other people take a 
great interest in furthering such pleasures as they 
can enjoy. I remember, as a case in point, an old 
lady living in an apartment house, who was invited 
to spend Thanksgiving with a relative in a distant 
part of the city. She had not been out of the house 
for months, but everybody was determined that 
she should not lose this pleasure. She could not 
go in the street-cars, but some one at once offered 
to engage a close carriage, though this would have 
been thought far too great an extravagance had 
she been younger. She had no suitable bonnet or 
cloak. Who needs a bonnet or cloak in a close 
carriage? everybody said. A velvet hood, made 
twenty years before, and a veteran shawl, were pro- 



240 OLD PEOPLE 

nounced by all the connoisseurs to be most elegant 
and suitable. Some one was ready to help the old 
lady in adjusting her neat black dress and shining 
white lace; the janitor himself — and he was not 
more active on most occasions than the majority 
of his race — was at hand to support her faltering 
steps down the stairs to the carriage, and the 
driver took the liveliest interest in bestowing his 
passenger comfortably. A dozen people wished 
her bon voyage. At the Thanksgiving dinner, hers, 
of course, was the place of honor. She was first 
served, and to the best of everything. Hers was 
the most comfortable chair, hers the warmest cor- 
ner. One vied with another in rendering her little 
services. She was the central figure in the circle. 
Everybody listened to her stories with the closest 
attention. Her spirits rose and she bubbled over 
with fun. The whole entertainment was charming, 
and she was the life of the party. 

Who is so deferred to at twenty years old ? Or 
at thirty? Or at forty? It is worth while to be 
eighty years old, and feeble, to have such a day, 
and to know that every individual about you is 
bent on making you happy. You feel, for once, 



PRIVILEGES 241 

that in spite of all the losses of the years, you still 
have the " troops of friends " that Shakespeare 
sets down in his enumeration of the blessings that 
should attend old age. It is not that you feel 
young again. No young person feels as you do. 
But for once you enjoy the full privilege of your 
age. 

So much for the minor privileges of old age. 
You could do very well without them. But you 
have a better heritage. Doctor Edward Everett 
Hale says in homely phrase, that Mrs. Morrow, who 
was sixty years of age, " was no longer a fool." 
Who would object to being sixty years of age to 
be no longer a fool ? 

A much-tried woman I know once said to me, 
" No, I do not want to be young again. JVo young 
person can hiow the joy of victory." I leave that 
statement as it stands for each to interpret accord- 
ing to his insight ; but perhaps it will not mean 
as much to others as it does to me, for I saw 
the battle my friend had to fight, and the hosts 
seemed to be still marshaled against her when she 
spoke of the joy of victory, and declared that she 
would not, if she could, go back to youth. 



242 OLD PEOPLE 

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton says : " I consider 
old age the hey-day of life, the grandest season 
allotted to mortals. We have learned to weigh 
things correctly. Our views are broader, and know- 
ledge of life's workings deeper and truer. Clearer 
vision comes as the years go by. I say it unhesi- 
tatingly — no woman reaches the fullest mental 
development until after she is fifty. Then in the 
afternoon of life comes leisure. We have time to 
read, to think, and to watch the fulfillment of hopes 
and the strides of progress. Life adjusts itself, 
and if we retain our interest in our fellow creatures 
and in the affairs of every-day life, we shall find 
our time and minds as full, as pleasantly full, as 
in the days of our youth." Is not this a bright 
picture ? But we know it is faithful to many old 
people. 

The fact that we see the needs of the world so 
much more clearly than we did when we were 
young makes it possible for us to help it more 
effectually : for it takes something more than raw 
muscle to do good deeds. 

And then, at the end of life, we often have more 
outside resources. Some of us have more money 



PRIVILEGES 243 

and more power than we used to have, and all of 
us have more acquaintances, so that if our will is set 
towards any good end, we have more agents for 
reaching it. 

Browning thinks the pause toward the close of 
life is a special privilege to give us the chance to 
weigh the past and receive from it the full help 
it has to give the future. 

" And I shall thereupon 

Take rest ere I be gone 
Again on my adventure strange and new, 

Fearless and unperplexed 

When I do battle next 
What weapons to select, what armor to indue." 

That is a brave belief. So much of our lives we 
are " moving about in worlds not realized " that 
we must feel it would be worth every pang that 
comes from weakness and pain to be able to sift 
our experiences and learn how to make them tell in 
a new life. I do not suppose many people do this 
consciously in old age. Browning was not old 
himself when he wrote Rabbi Ben Ezra. Still, 
the old do, almost unawares, judge their own past, 
and from it they learn what they wish to save. 



XVIII 



SUNSET 

There are more beautiful sunsets than gloomy 
ones. A rainy day often ends in a glorious sky. 
It is always worth hoping for. Sometimes, of 
course, the mists endure to the end, but far 
oftener the sun bursts through them, and the il- 
lumination is all the more splendid because of the 
brilliant colors reflected from the varying clouds. 
We need not fear that life will end in a cloud. 
We have every reason to hope otherwise ; and 
then, even if our hope should not be realized, the 
cloudy hours will be shortened. To look at life 
as " A beautiful Now and a better To Be," is to 
take the true attitude toward it always, though 
probably none of us can altogether escape seasons 
when we are so weighed down by grief and care 
that we cannot rise to such a height. When the 
old live in that spirit, the sunset of life is su- 
premely lovely. 

Some old people seem to have all 



SUNSET 245 

"which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." 

I have known many happy husbands and wives 
who in their age lived in comfort and ease, with 
good health, — even though strength may have 
waned, — with children and grandchildren about 
them, loving and reverencing them, and with 
friends who honored them. In cases like these, 
there is a " Beautiful Now," And if life has taught 
those so blest to look beyond to a " Better To 
Be," their sunset is serene. 

But when we have fallen into the " sere and 
yellow leaf," we have not always all the blessing 
that in Shakespeare's mind " should accompany 
old age." There are clouds in most sunsets though 
the beauty is not the less for that. 

I remember a poor little home where the old 
husband and wife sat side by side, quietly looking 
out at the world, as John Anderson and his wife 
may have sat at the last. They were poor and un- 
educated, they had no children and not many 
friends ; but they cheerfully helped each other to 
keep their little home neat, and they worked as 
they could, the husband doing odd jobs for the 



246 OLD PEOPLE 

neighbors, and the wife helping the busy house- 
keepers in an emergency. They looked as if their 
sunset was serene. 

I know two charming old ladies who are sisters. 
They live a life of devotion to each other. You 
might think the beauty of life was past because 
they are so frail. One or the other is always ill. 
But their love for each other illuminates even the 
sick room. She who is well spends herself for her 
sister, and when she falls ill in turn, her convales- 
cent sister watches over her with the same untir- 
ing love. They are devoted to each other but not 
absorbed in each other, which is a very different 
thing. They cannot often go away, but their 
cheerful refined home is full of friendly life. It 
stands in the middle of the village, and everybody 
drops in, sure of a cordial welcome. There is al- 
ways room at their hospitable tea-table for any 
forlorn neighbor who happens to feel lonely. One 
of the ladies is past ninety, and her reminiscences 
are invaluable to all those of the younger genera- 
tions who wish to know the past of the county. 
The other still successfully cultivates a beautiful 
garden. It not only adds to the brightness of the 



SUNSET 247 

village, but its treasures are freely gathered for 
the sick and the poor, and for decoration at any 
festival, and always for the church. It is love for 
each other and for their neighbors that makes the 
clouds of their sunset so rosy. 

My earliest impression of old age was beautiful. 
As a child, I used to see at church a noble, white- 
haired old gentleman past ninety who, at certain 
of the services, was in the habit of rising and 
repeating reverently the 103d Psalm. " Bless the 
Lord, my soul, and all that is within me, bless 
his holy name." So I learned to think of age as a 
time to give thanks for the mercies of life. 

In all the cases I have spoken of, the old people 
had an assured place in a home among their own 
kindred who loved them. But some must be alone. 
I know a cheerful old gentleman, left alone, whose 
smile is always bright. He cultivates his garden 
and gives his neighbors fresh vegetables, and as 
he does his own cooking, the neighboring house- 
wives have an opportunity to return his favors by 
sending him choice dishes of their own making. 
He devotes himself to his church, to his prayer- 
meeting, and to his duties as a citizen. He is the 



248 OLD PEOPLE 

best of grandfathers, though his grandchildren 
are too far away to give him their company often. 
He writes cheerful letters to his lonely, unmarried 
nieces, scattered about the country, determined to 
send as much sunshine into their lives as he can. 
Then, in the tedious winter hours when his rheu- 
matism keeps him at home, he whiles away the 
time by writing out his reminiscences. " Nobody 
will publish them," he says, for his school-days 
were short, and he doubts whether he can put his 
anecdotes into phrases that will bear criticism. 
And, indeed, his reminiscences are worth while, 
for he was a sailor in the days when Samoa was 
the home of cannibals, and he landed in Cali- 
fornia before gold was discovered there. 

I remember a woman who was even more alone, 
whose face was always bright. She had never had 
such a home as seems the birthright of all, for 
she was an illegitimate child. She had had her 
own living to earn, and she had had to work hard 
for it. And yet she had succeeded in caring for 
others who had been kind to her. In her old age 
she had only a pittance and not a relative in the 
world. Then her sight began to fail ominously. 



SUNSET 249 

She knew that if she lived long she should be 
blind. Still, her cheerfulness and courage did not 
fail. She kept chickens and sold eggs. She made 
jelly to sell — and she still could be generous. 
She could give away a glass of jelly or half-a- 
dozen eggs sometimes. She thankfully accepted 
the good dinners to which one or another neigh- 
bor would invite her from time to time. I believe 
she thought her lines had fallen in pleasant 
places. She was devoted to church-work. As she 
lay ill, she heard of the death of a valued friend 
who was one of the most efficient of her co-work- 
ers. " We shall miss her dreadfully/' she said, 
" but the rest of us must work all the harder." 
Then, in a few days, she slipped away from earth, 
brave and cheerful to the end. 

You see that circumstances are nothing, after all. 
It is the spirit that rules. We should not choose 
to be poor and ill and blind and alone in our old 
age, but we may be all these, and still our sunset 
may be beautiful. The brave and cheerful always 
see the sun behind the clouds ; but those who have 
love in their hearts carry the sunshine with them. 

Even when the power to work is gone, the spirit 



250 OLD PEOPLE 

need not fail. It is what we are and not what we 
do that counts. It is the " atmosphere " we carry 
with us that makes our lives beautiful, and that 
enables us to touch other lives with beauty. 

Not all sunsets are beautiful. Mrs. Thrale's pic- 
ture of the last days of life in The Three Warn- 
ings used to be in the reading-books when I was 
a girl, and the children who read the verses al- 
ways laughed at them. Does everybody remem- 
ber them ? 

" The tree of deepest root is found 
Least willing yet to leave the ground. 
It has been sung by ancient sages 
That love of life increased with years, 
So much that in our latter stages, 
When pains grow sharp and sickness rages, 
The greatest love of life appears." 

What amused the children was, first, the account 
of " Neighbor Dobson's wedding-day/' when 
Death called upon the " jocund groom " to quit his 
" Susan's side/' and, afterwards, when the bride- 
groom had begged off for the time, and had ex- 
torted a promise from Death that he should have 
three warnings before being forced to accompany 



SUNSET 251 

him, the still greater unwillingness he showed to 
go, though Death pertinently declared, — 

" If you are lame, and deaf, and blind, 
You've had your three sufficient warnings." 

The children could not understand that anybody 
who was lame and deaf and blind should care about 
living. But then death seemed a long way off to 
them. When it is very near, a stout heart sometimes 
falters. On the earth you feel at home. You be- 
lieve in a beautiful life beyond, but it is strange 
to you. You would like to stay a little — only 
a little longer — on this green earth. 

We shall hardly find a more masterly treatment 
of this subject than in the Alkestis of Euripides, 
in the dialogue between Admetus and his old 
father Pheres. When Admetus was doomed by 
the Fates to die, they granted his life to Apollo 
on condition that some one should voluntarily die 
in his stead. No one would do this but his young 
and dearly loved wife, Alkestis. It seemed mon- 
strous to Admetus that he must lose her — and he 
had thought it would be easy for his father or 
mother to make the sacrifice for him. " Thou ex- 
ceedest all in nothingness of soul," he says to 



252 OLD PEOPLE 

Pheres, " who, being of the age thou art, and hav- 
ing come to the goal of life, neither hadst the will 
nor the courage to die for thy son. ... In vain 
then do old men pray to be dead, complaining of 
age, and the long time of life ; but if death come 
near, not one is willing to die, and old age is no 
longer burdensome to them." Pheres replies to the 
charge of " nothingness of soul " by pointing out 
the " nothingness of soul " of Admetus himself. 
"Hold thy peace," he says, " and consider, if thou 
lovest thy life, that all love theirs." "What," 
says Admetus, in astonishment, " is it the same 
thing for a man in his prime, and for an old man 
to die?" " Sweet is this light of the God," says 
Pheres, " sweet is it." 

Who, as he reads Mrs. Thrale, does not wince 
at the possibility of ever becoming like Neighbor 
Dobson, not because he was " lame, and deaf, and 
blind," but because he clung to life simply for 
the sake of existing and not for its noble uses ? 
Who, as he reads Euripides, does not feel a long- 
ing to be like Alkestis rather than like Pheres, 
even though it was Admetus and not Pheres who 
was in the wrong ? And yet the words of Pheres 



SUNSET 253 

are touching : " Sweet is this light of the God, 
sweet is it." We ought to feel it is sweet, even 
when we are called to leave it. Pheres thought 
only of a sombre underworld to come, and that 
he was leaving light forever. His temptation was 
sorer than that of those who feel, like Elsie of the 
Golden Legend who gives her life for Prince 
Henry, that death is 

" Only a step into the open air 
Out of a tent already luminous 
With light that shines through its transparent walls." 

But Alkestis, too, felt that she must leave the 
light forever, and yet she chose death because the 
only life worth having was the noblest life. 

It is not clouds that make a gloomy sunset, 
but clouds untouched by the radiance of the sun 
behind them. I hope we have all been so happy 
as to have seen old people whose hearts were so 
full of love and faith that every new burden laid 
upon them was only like another cloud shining 
with color added to their sunset. To love the 
world while we are in it, no matter how heavily we 
are weighted, and then to be glad to leave it when 
our day has come, is to have a triumphant life. 



254 OLD PEOPLE 

The dread of the unknown is somewhat a mat- 
ter of temperament, though the habit of always 
facing duty, whatever its possible results may be, 
will certainly go far to correct the shrinking from 
death that so often seems inborn. And it is a help 
to us all to know that others look forward hope- 
fully even when we are beset by doubts ourselves. 
But nobody can prove immortality to another. It 
is a personal experience. A kind, gentle old lady, 
who has passed her life in making others happy, 
says earnestly, " I like to hear others say that they 
believe in a beautiful future ; but when they say 
they know, I stop listening. Nobody knows." And 
yet not all who say they know are using cant. The 
conviction of the truth of what they say is so vivid 
that they believe they know, at all events. 

Many people are born with the feeling of im- 
mortality so firmly implanted within them that 
the belief is never shaken. Others take without 
question what their parents teach them, and never 
doubt the future. Others, and there are many 
such, seem to win immortality here in this world 
by living so faithfully in the spirit of the great 
truths that make life eternal even now, they dis- 



SUNSET 255 

card so completely all that is merely temporary in 
their daily lives, that they, too, feel sure that they 
knoiv the future. And yet no one of these people 
can teach immortality to another. And there are 
some, even among the most faithful souls, who 
can never overcome the fear imposed upon them 
by an anxious temperament. Such a fear clouds 
the sunset of life, and calls for pity. But the sun 
does shine even when the clouds hide it completely. 
And those who realize this can often comfort and 
reassure those who do not. 

When the mind is withdrawn, the sunset is 
darkest of all. But perhaps then it is oftener the 
friends of the afflicted one who suffer than the 
one whose mind is darkened. 

" God moves in a mysterious way 
His wonders to perform. " 

And who can venture to suggest an explanation 
for this last calamity ? 

That the sunset of life is always more beautiful 
to those who have faith than to those who have 
not is certainly true, and faithfulness usually, 
though not always, brings faith with it. " In- 
sight," says Doctor Gordon, in his Ultimate Con- 



256 OLD PEOPLE 

ceptions of Faith, " is not the first but the final 
mood of the doer of righteousness. . . . For the 
normal believer the full truth is the glorious sun- 
down at the earthly limit of love and service." 
"To nobler service ye pass on," 

Charles Wesley sings. 

I wonder if anybody reads De Senectute in 
modern days without a feeling of sadness that, 
with all its noble thought, it is so little touched 
by the ideal. Christianity has given us an ideal so 
far beyond that of Cicero that our whole tone of 
thought is unconsciously heightened by it. 

This is a gift to us, and it transfigures the 
clouds of our sunset. When we have learned that 
we are children of a Father whose name is Love, 
the trials of life count for little, even in the most 
narrow and painful old age. 

The clouds gather. The sun goes down ; but it 
has not perished. Then "the deeper midnight 
uncovers larger stars," and then, lo ! 

" 'T is sunrise on the mountains 
And life is yet to win." 



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